Mr. DeLillo,
I read your column every month. I hate it, but I cannot help myself. It is like seeing a car crash, I cannot turn away. You are the most loathsome and vile creature who has ever walked the earth. It is repugnant to me that you claimed to be a good American. In my opinion you should be thrown in jail, but in the words of our great leader George W. Bush during his second inauguration: “From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth.” So I guess you have the right to say whatever you want. Only in America. If it were up to me you and all your kind would be rounded up and put away forever.
Very Sincerely,
Spiritual Choleric Angry Neo-Conservative

Dear SCANC,

Although it’s not up to you, there is always a chance I will be put away forever. My uncle Cesar Senior was. He feels passionately about this country in ways that you can only imagine. This country has given him so much. It has given relentlessly.
He was born on the Trail of Tears to an Indian and a slave in 1838. He was emancipated from slavery in 1865. His family was massacred at Wounded Knee in 1890. He lived in Hawaii until the U.S. invaded in 1893. He adopted his sister’s children after she went into a coma after she was hit by a rock while demonstrating for the right to vote in 1920. She was half-Japanese and came out of the coma just in time to be put in an interment camp in 1942. Cesar worked in Hollywood until he was blacklisted and jailed in 1950. He considered himself lucky compared to his best friend Julius Rosenberg who was executed in 1953. In 1966 his nephew was lynched for illegally marrying outside his race. In 1969 Cesar Senior was arrested for patronizing a gay bar. In 1970 his eighteen-year-old nephew was jailed for draft dodging. Said nephew thought himself too young to kill because the government thought him too young to vote. He was lucky. His twin brother was killed by the army that same day in 1970 at Kent State. In 1988 Cesar was jailed for sending money to a sick friend in Cuba. In jail he met a mentally retarded man who didn’t know what year it was or how many nickels were in a dime. The Supreme Court upheld the retard’s conviction and he was executed in 1989. Cesar was jailed again in 2002 after the police entered his apartment without a search warrant while he was sodomizing his boyfriend. His dream was to get married, but in 2004 his state voted to ban same-sex marriage. In the words of one man (married and divorced six times), “marriage is a sacred union in the eyes of the Lord.” Sex was his third strike. Under the “three strikes you’re out” law he was sentenced to life in prison because over the course of his life he had once attended a communist lecture, once helped a sick friend, and had sex (probably more than once).
With its prison population accounting for twenty-five percent of the world’s, the United States is truly great. As a tiny fraction of that number Cesar Senior, along with twelve percent of all black men between the ages of eighteen and thirty, is doing his part to make the U.S. number one. It’s no wonder the U.S. is called the land of opportunity. Cesar Senior has had opportunities people in other countries can only marvel at. He now spends his days getting gang raped and thanking his lucky stars that he is a citizen of the U.S.A. who has rights, dignity, and matchless value. I got sidetracked. Did you have a question?
Thanks for the letter,
Cesar Augustus DeLillo
cadvice@mail.com