Our Modest Application

Dear Mr. Blanche,

Allow me to introduce myself--Michael Dickey, of the Yalobusha County Dickeys.

It has come to my attention in recent days that you've created a small fund in the amount of $1.776 billion (I see what you did there--you MAGA guys are the cleverest!) that will largely be devoted to compensating those who, labeled as "insurrectionists", were subjected to "lawfare" by the federal government. On behalf of myself and hills full of similarly damaged cousins, I respectfully request that your office consider this our application for compensation related to a prior insurrection in which my ancestors participated.

Going back to 1861, the Yalobusha Dickeys were minding our own business, growing cotton and slopping hogs, when news spread that an invading army was coming to burn our barns and marry off our daughters to the neighbors' slaves. That army was, as you may remember, the military of your very own government, trying to force "woke" concepts like slave emancipation and equal protection under the law upon the law abiding residents of the sovereign Southern states, in direct contravention to the Bible's teachings and as an affront to our way of life.

My ancestors did as you might expect. One joined a volunteer infantry regiment and was promptly killed at Shiloh along with a bunch of his neighbors. We Dickeys have a bad habit of being killed in our first contact with the enemy, an observation that led to some fraught days for my parents in the first hours of the Gulf War and that later led me to stay back on the farm when the spiritual descendants of our Rebel forebears descended on the Capitol on January 6th.

My great-grandfather's older brother rode with General Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry. You remember General Forrest, who went on to form what you might think of as a precursor of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

What our family endured because of our heroic defense of our constitutional rights was almost indescribable--crops burned, livestock turned into army rations, black folks being allowed to sit next to us at the lunch counter at Turnage's Rexall, where my father worked as a teenager. The economic and emotional toll left us poor and a little miffed, but we're tough. And so here I am, asking for our piece of the pie as compensation for what old Woke Abraham did to us so many years ago.

I remember some time ago hearing an inebriated fellow Dawg say at a tailgate party that one day the feds needed to pay us all back for the property that they "liberated" in 1865. I never thought that moment would finally come.

Thank your for your attention to this matter.

MPD