The Sparrow's Eye is on the Wetback

IN THE FUTURE, crows, seagulls and other birds will be genetically engineered to act as border patrols and security guards. They are everywhere, watching us all anyway, and they have amazing eyesight, so this will be a rather logical move. They will be trained to activate an alert button when they see a Mexican slipping through a hole in fencing, or a Cuban drifting ashore on a raft he bought at one of the three Havana Toys R Us stores.

They will be paid in Cheese curls and birdseed. They will turn in whole families for three fluorescent orange cheese curls. And love it.

Why, you might ask, would a Cuban citizen risk his life crossing the cruel, shark-infested Atlantic once Cuba is nothing more than one big American shopping mall and thoroughly democratic? "To escape that fucking Friday traffic and all those fucking Starbucks!" he will quickly tell you.

Birds will appear on our money and in our national iconography even more than they do now. The seagull, in particular, will undergo a serious image makeover from its current status as "aerial rodent" and "annoying dumpster diver," to "proud defender of the American borders." Children will be given chocolate sparrows at Halloween as a sort of little nationalistic treat. Children will wear different species of birds as mascots as they progress through the Avian Scouts.

Needless to say, birds will be hated in the third world, and many birds which have not had their intelligence modified (the spy birds get recombinant DNA taken from some of the sneakier Bush family members) will be needlessly shot, stoned, pierced by arrows and poisoned with bad feed. These poor dumb creatures will fall to the earth in innocence, paying for the sins of their brothers in wings. They will be the little Christs of the future, but no one will remember their names.

Wait, they didn't have names, did they?

Oh well.

I think God wrote, "Oh, by the way Nature is a dumpster. Sorry 'bout that."

But they forgot to put that in the Bible.