Congratulations Chinaman!

It’s 2009 and you run the last opium den in San Francisco. It’s a tough way to make a living. Your profits margins are razor thin, college campus dealers cutting in on your market. You used to supplement your primary income with a little money from the slave trade, but after the fall of the Iron Curtain the Russian mob made that all but impossible.

And lately there’s been a new DA in town who’s taken a very hard line against, as he puts it, “Orientals who own and operate businesses in the San Francisco metropolitan area.” He’s decided that the best way he can put the Asian community of the Bay Area into its “proper place” is by making an example of you.

He’s been doing all he can to remove you from the better business association, and he’d have succeeded by now but you’ve been paid up with the right people for decades, and recently the ACLU has become involved.

At first people believe he was just crusading against drug use, and treated his campaign with the same apathy that everyone has since Ronald Reagan’s wife first took the bold stance that marijuana directly correlates to rape. But as his comments garnered more and more media attention people realized that his motivations were rooted in racism, not some misguided desire to “clean up our streets.”

You’ve been thinking about giving up the ghost and starting a pet shop with the last of your ill gotten gains, but Wednesday you’ll be getting a call for the ACLU. As you know, they’d defend a horse rapist if they thought it would make a point about the sacredness of human rights, so you’ll be small potatoes for them.

They’ll drum up media support for you, portray you as a man holding on to traditions in a modern world who is being targeted by a heartless institution solely because of his race. You’ll become a rallying point for the community.

Business will pick up dramatically. Aging hippies and insufferable college students will start frequenting your opium den, and before long you’ll be far enough back into the green that you’ll be able to hire prostitutes to attend to your client’s every need.

All because you stayed the course, and accepted the blind assistance of the ACLU. Congratulations chinaman! Does that term still fly in that part of the world?