The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You got a reality TV president, cabinets full of Fox News talking heads, talk show hosts as advisors, why not go whole hog and solve a few of the thorniest problems with reality show solutions? The latest entry from the clown power brokers is for a contest to pit immigrants against one another, the winner receiving U.S. citizenship. Dancing with the Stars meets Queen for a Day, what’s not to love? The losers, presumably, get deported back to the hellhole they tried to escape. Although, from my twisted perspective, the show might very well be the hellhole they needed to escape.

Maybe you’re too young to remember Queen for a Day. The premise was fairly simple. The women candidates were trotted out to the audience and asked to offer up their collective tragedies, everything from crippling diseases to dying children, all heart-wrenching personal misfortunes now displayed for the consumption of a national television audience. The winner, the most tragic of the bunch, would win prizes like washing machines and color TV’s, merchandise that would assuage the mishaps of a life gone terribly wrong. A life that every one in the audience might imagine could happen to them.

Maybe the Citizen for a Day show would offer up similar tragedies, tales of gang killings in El Salvador or rapes by banditos on the long hike through the entirety of Mexico. Murders, mayhem, poverty and atrocity. We could vote on who would be most worthy of American sympathy. The other contestants? Well we don’t have all the room in the world for refugees and we certainly don’t have room in our collective hearts.

The danger, of course, would be humanizing these desperate immigrants, showing how returning them to their countries of origin might actually be a death sentence for them. It’s one thing to deport supposed gang members without legal redress but it might be a bridge too far to send a mother and kids back to the town where the real gangs threatened to kill them, why they left in the first place. Like a lot of plans proposed by the government lately, I suspect this one is dead on arrival. At least I hope so.