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When news stories about bedbugs started showing up a few years back, I wrote that bedbugs were out of my father's world, the 1920s world of immigrant tenement dwellers.

My father told hilariously about his mother's battles with bedbugs.

"After she boiled all the sheets, she'd paint the bed slats with kerosene, and she'd put all four legs of the bed in cans of kerosene.

"And my father smoked," my father would laugh. "I don't know why in hell the whole apartment didn't explode."

And from my mother, a grimmer story.

My mother's brother, still a toddler, developed whooping cough.

"It gives you a lot of phlegm," my mother said. "My brother was choking on it.

"My father held my brother out a third-floor tenement window by his ankles so the phlegm would drain out of him."

The kid lived.

This is called "whole-istic healing," because no one in the family had a "whole $2" to pay a doctor.

My father's mother was pregnant 13 times and raised six children to adulthood.

"The strong one, they live. The weak one, they die," she told my mother in her rough English.

We got an increase in whooping cough in the United States right now because if you take even one vaccine, you become a gay autistic communist.

We got people dying of measles because if you get the measles vaccine, you grow up, go to Harvard and major in gender studies instead of going to air conditioning school. Also, you get autism, and you become a communist.

The choice is pretty plain; die of a childhood disease, or become an autistic drag queen who reads "The Communist Manifesto" to children. We need to let kids be kids, and they should learn about the means of production on the street, like I did.

I look for a big return of the plagues that plagued my simple, Christian, patriotic ancestors. Bring on diphtheria! It kills you dead as hell, but at least you won't grow up to be gay. Rickets and pellagra used to be the main diseases of poverty, both caused by malnutrition. But if you give poor people free food, they become communists, and you're a communist for giving them the food. Polio is just waiting to make us better Americans, and tuberculosis is just waiting to come back and make us better Americans.

Americans used to be willing to die for a just cause. Now, we die for every made-up piece of junk talk radio and podcasts shovel in our direction.

And why stop at the plagues of my recent ancestors? My family was around during the Middle Ages. How 'bout a little Black Death, maybe some cholera? You cut your hand, you sprinkle some holy water on it, it gets infected, you turn green, puff up like a toad and die screaming on a bed of straw in a mud hut infested by, hell yes, bedbugs.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.