Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite ... Again

I remember my father singing,

"Oh, say can you see, any bedbugs on me,"

"If you do, pick a few ..."

It was meant to be funny, as it was to my 8-year-old self in 1965, as I'm sure it had been to his 8-year-old self in 1928.

I would not, as a child, have made up a nonsense song about bedbugs, not any more than I would have joked about cockroaches or the indignities of using newspapers for toilet paper.

Those were all things that inhabited my father's immigrant New England neighborhood, along with rickets and $1 a day cotton mill jobs where the boss was quite free to call you by an insulting name based on your country of origin.

My father, who did not attend college, had paddled his family away from those waters, taking advantage of corporate America's post-World War II boom to become the sort of man who wore a tie to work. Our home was bug free, Ma bought two-ply toilet paper, and no one had to get up early and light the coal furnace. One of the things my father achieved in his life was raising a son to whom bedbugs were mythical, funny creatures.

But bedbugs were very real to my father, an object of defensive street humor, but also creatures to be battled in the cold water tenement flats of his childhood.

Which is why, and maybe more than most, I'm disturbed to read newspaper stories about New Yorkers battling bedbugs, both in public housing and in posh apartments.

Bedbugs, like bank failures and not going to school because you don't have shoes, are supposed to be GONE. They are things my father battled himself away from, rising at last into apartments with, as we said in my youth, "everything new."

I've been writing for some time that 2010 America seems hell-bent on returning to 1910 America, a "simpler" time when, according to eyewitnesses, most people were dirt poor and illiterate, racism was open and constant, and people who struck to unionize were at least fired, sometimes beaten and sometimes shot.

So bedbugs fit my theory — a thing that does not make me happy.

I think the bedbugs started warming up in the bullpen (mixed metaphor) about the time employers began to say again, "You're lucky to have a job" — a phrase of great popularity in early 20th century America.

How long must some employers have waited to tell you it was a thing of luck to be employed! How trembling the phrase must have paused on the tip of the manager's tongue before taking the first leap into out-loud conversation! How happy the phrase must have been to crawl about the office or factory floor like a bedbug, looking for a warm body from which to suck, if not blood, then at least a bit of dignity!

Some years ago, working as a reporter, I attended the opening of a large corporate business that employed numerous people paid exactly $1 an hour more than minimum wage.

I was admitted to the business a half hour before the doors opened, and the newly-hired employees were asked (as if there existed a possibility of refusal) to do the "corporate cheer."

They did the cheer, and they did it loudly, too, a ringing, shouted reflection of how lucky they were to work for a wage, any wage.

And, what the hell, the boss was watching.

The photographer I was with on that assignment is, like me, an unreconstructed working man.

"Geez," I told him as we walked back to our cars.

Later that day, someone who had a better job than I did very carefully (and rather slowly) explained to me that the people who gave the corporate cheer were "lucky to have a job."

But as for me, that morning, as the sound of the corporate cheer died out in the air-conditioned silence, I thought I heard the bedbugs singing.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Crreators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com

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