Corpse of a Puerto Rican made up to be THE GREEN LANTERN

"They are like children," I recall one charitable, Liberal white guy say. He was trying to explain, or rather, cope with the influx of Blacks and Puerto Ricans into his neighborhood.

"You just have to realize they're children. Don't expect much. You can't reason with them."

It's an interesting philosophy. Immigrants of all types are flooding in, insisting on their own customs, and stubbornly refusing to grow up and learn to read or speak English. So what do you do? Treat 'em like children. Smile, nod, stay as far away as possible, and consider them naive and cute but dangerous and prone to lethal tantrums.

Here's a Puerto Rican who, at 50, hadn't progressed beyond comic books. He liked to DRESS UP as the Green Lantern. He even wanted to be the Green Lantern in death!

Classy?

Classy as a car horn that plays "La Cucaracha." Classy as wearing the Puerto Rican flag on your snapbrim cap. Classy as eating lardy cookies on the subway. Yes, Latina ladies can often be found illegally loitering on subway platforms with an open shopping cart loaded with long greasy desserts at $1 each, the perfect snack in a claustrophobic, noisy tunnel of dirty air and mouth-breathers all around you).

Weirdo wakes are common in Latin culture. It barely made the back page of a newspaper or the "strange but true" column when 80 year-old Georgina Lloren's corpse was seen in her rocking chair, like Norman Bates' mother, or Chris Rivera's stiff body was placed upright inside a mock boxing ring, or David Colon was hoisted onto his beloved motorcycle. Muerte? Oh, Mama!

It's possible that all this goes back to the "Day of the Dead" festivities, which I've got to say look like the ONLY reason to ever visit Mexico. A much more grim version of Halloween, everyone dresses up like skeletons, sell skeleton art, and generally offer salutes to the Grim Reaper. Mocking him shows that death is acknowledged but not feared. Si? Si!

But it gets SILLY, si, when some overgrown and dead guy with a childlike mind stands there dressed like the fucking Green Lantern.

I guess everyone's lucky he wasn't a bigger fan of Wonder Woman.