The beetle on my rose bush has never been to Japan.
Neither has his dad. Neither has his dad’s dad. You’d have to go all the way back to 1916, to a nursery outside Riverton, New Jersey, and a crate of iris bulbs nobody bothered to look inside, before you find one single Japanese beetle in this entire bloodline who could find Japan on a map.
That’s a hundred and ten years. That’s longer than my whole family’s been white.
My people came over from Poland in the 1890s, and let me tell you, we were not white when we got here. We were Polacks. We were a punchline and a fire hazard. It took two generations, a name that fit on a form, and a hard swerve into “we’ve always loved this country” before anybody handed us the good paperwork. Now I’ve got a lawn and opinions about it. That’s the deal. That’s the whole scam and it works every time.
And yet. Every June this beetle hatches out of MY grass, climbs MY rose, and some seasonal kid at the garden center calls him a foreign national.
He was born here, dude. In the dirt. Eleven feet from a Weber grill.
So the courts went and said the thing the courts said about birthright citizenship, and I’ve been chewing on it out in the yard, which is where I do most of my chewing, and where most of my chewing goes sideways.
The standard’s right there in the text. Born here. That’s it. That’s the whole quiz. Nobody wrote an asterisk about legs.
Okay. Fine. The amendment says persons. A beetle is not a person.
But a corporation is a person. We settled that one years ago and everybody just nodded and went to lunch. So the beetle files paperwork. Popillia Holdings LLC, Delaware, sole member a bug.
Now he’s a person AND a small business.
Good luck deporting a small business. (Good luck getting one to return an email.)
He’ll do it right, too. He’ll underpay six guys, stiff a contractor, write off the rose as a company vehicle. That’s not me being cynical about immigrants. That’s me being accurate about Delaware.
Once you start down this road you can’t stop, and I did not stop, and I want you to know I lost a whole Saturday.
The Norway rat has never been to Norway. He’s not from Norway. He’s from northern China, somebody got it wrong in 1769, and nobody’s had the guts to correct it since. The rat in my barn was born under a pallet of chicken feed in Albemarle County, Virginia. He’s got a Southern accent. He votes. He hates Norway and he’s never met a Norwegian and those two facts are related in a way he will not examine.
The German cockroach is not German. The American cockroach is African. Those two need to swap folders at the DMV and then never speak of it again.
The house sparrow got dumped in Brooklyn in 1851 by a guy with a plan. English sparrow, we call him. He is a Brooklyn bird. He has ALWAYS been a Brooklyn bird. He’ll knife you over a waffle fry in a Wendy’s parking lot and I ask you... is that England?
The starling showed up in Central Park in 1890 because one man decided America needed more birds. Genuinely. A guy named Schieffelin let a hundred of them go on purpose. Two hundred million descendants later, every one of them born in a strip mall sign, and they’re all his fault and we still file them under European. One rich guy’s hobby became a permanent national infestation and nobody made him pay for it. THAT is the most American thing in this entire essay and I include the turkey.
Speaking of.
I want to talk about the turkey.
The turkey is from HERE. Most American thing in the woods. He was here before the flag, before the highway, before the deep fryer that has ended so many of his people. And we named him after a country he has never visited, because in the 1500s some merchant in London saw a weird bird and guessed.
That’s the reverse case. Native-born citizen walking around with somebody else’s passport stapled to his face. Ben Franklin wanted him on the seal, which tells you the vetting was already a mess back then.
Same energy as the french fry. Belgian. Always was. We just liked the other name better and nobody sued. And here’s the thing that keeps me up... it was a waffle fry the sparrow was fighting over back there. In the Wendy’s lot. A BELGIAN fry. So that Brooklyn bird from England was ready to die over Belgian food we call French. Nobody in that parking lot was from where they said they were. Not even the potato.
But the one I really want naturalized is the Canada goose.
Because the Canada goose doesn’t go to Canada anymore. Did you know that? Whole resident population now. They quit. They found a retention pond behind a Panera and said, yep, this’ll do.
They live in office parks. They stand in the road and stare down your Subaru. They hiss at toddlers with total confidence and zero follow-through. They ruined a soccer field and felt nothing.
Tell me that’s not an American.
Give that goose a Social Security number, a small unpaid tax obligation, and a strong wrong opinion about a war, and let him get on with it.
Here’s how I’d run the ceremony.
Folding table. Court officer who’d rather be dead. One of those little flags on a stick, the forty-cent kind, straight in the trash by Tuesday.
The clerk reads the oath. The beetle can’t hear it, doesn’t have ears in the way you’d want, and honestly isn’t listening.
Everyone claps anyway. There’s a sheet cake. It’s from Kroger. Says CONGRATULATIONS in blue gel and somebody already ate the corner.
Now, I’m not letting EVERYBODY in. Come on. I have standards. They’re terrible, but I have them.
The spotted lanternfly showed up in 2014. Fourteen. That’s yesterday. That’s a guy who moved to Brooklyn last spring and already corrects your pronunciation of the neighborhood. He can wait in line like the rest of us. The state of Pennsylvania has literally asked me to stomp him on sight, which is the first time a government ever gave me a job I actually wanted.
Emerald ash borer, 2002, still processing. Sorry, pal. Backlog. Everybody’s furious about it and none of it moves the line.
Kudzu gets in immediately. No questions, no interview. Kudzu has covered nine million acres of the South, eaten four barns, a Pontiac, and part of a Baptist church, and at this point kudzu isn’t a plant. Kudzu is a county.
You don’t naturalize a county. A county naturalizes YOU.
Anyway I went out to tell the beetle.
Got down on the grass, got real close, and explained the whole thing. The ruling, the Fourteenth Amendment, the LLC, the sheet cake. Top to bottom. Calm voice.
He listened. Or he sat there. Same posture, honestly, hard to call it.
Then he ate the rose.
Receipts, for the one guy in the comments who’s already typing:
The beetle really did show up in a Riverton, New Jersey nursery in 1916, grubbing along in a crate of iris bulbs. The starlings really are one rich guy’s fault — sixty birds in 1890, two hundred million now, no invoice. And Pennsylvania really will deputize you to stomp a lanternfly on sight, which remains the finest thing my government has ever offered me.
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.
He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.