The US House of Representatives on Wednesday voted 377-44 to condemn the words “river” and “sea” as hate speech. The new bill imposes fines of up to six million dollars, and prison terms of six million years to life, for the use of the two anti-Semitic expressions.
The bill includes a provision requiring that all flowing bodies of water previously designated as R’s be renamed as watercourses, waterways, streams, tributaries, brooks, inlets, rivulets, rills, runnels, streamlets, freshlets, canals, channels, bourns, creeks, rillets, or billabongs. Another provision mandates that S’s be henceforth referred to as oceans, saltwater expanses, gulfs, briny deeps, bounding mains, or Davy Jones’ lockers.
Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL expressed his approval, saying “The removal of a pernicious anti-Semitic trope from the name of our nation’s greatest waterway, the Mississippi Rivulet, is a victory for tolerance and diversity.” He added that he hoped the US would pressure Mexico to officially designate the waters east of Baja California as the Briny Deep of Cortez, and that everyone would remember to end “America the Beautiful” with the resounding chorus: “From saltwater expanse to shining saltwater expanse.” Greenblatt also noted that the much-covered Al Green classic “Take Me to the Tributary” was a much better refrain now thanks to its newly-installed alliteration, and that the John Fogarty’s “Proud Mary” was considerably less anti-Semitic with the new refrain “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the rillet.”
The bill orders the Library of Congress and the National Security Agency to jointly develop an AI algorithm tasked with removing all instances of the banned words from the internet. The Library of Congress is also required, under provision 4.299 of the bill, to remove the offending terms from its hard copy collection using scissors and/or marker pens.
“The R word and the S word are code for the elimination of Israel,” said one of its sponsors, Congressman Josh Gottheimer. “They are pernicious anti-Semitic tropes. I would have preferred sending people who use such words to the gas chambers, but I guess six-million-to-life in the slammer will suffice.”
Reached at its home in the rotunda of the National Archives Building in Washington, the Bill of Rights screamed, emitted a death rattle, and then was silent.