politics

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America its them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

~Allen Ginsberg, Berkeley, January 17, 1956

I usually try to avoid political stuff on my website, but today I’m going to go ahead and share a bunch of memes that pretty much say a lot of what I might say about Mr. President. If you love Donald Trump, you are probably going to hate what I am getting ready to post… so word of warning…

 

 

 

 

I found this article a few years back… I think its kind of interesting, and worth revisiting.

german_soldiers_fighting_graveyard_cod3

“A War on Death?”
By Thomas H. Naylor

“One of the paradoxes of the American experience is that although most Americans have an obsessive compulsive fear of death, they are also strongly attracted to war – particularly to wars against bigger-than-life figures such as Adolf Hitler, Hirohito, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. The so-called Cold War lasted nearly a half century. It is not by chance alone that American presidents have turned to war as a metaphor to promote their favorite big ticket causes including the War on Poverty, the War on Cancer, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror.

What these metaphorical wars have in common is that they have all cost countless billions of dollars with little or no evidence of success. Not only has poverty not been eliminated, but the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. We don’t seem to be any closer to finding a cure for cancer than we were in 1971 when Richard Nixon first declared war on the dread disease. Drug addiction in this country continues unabated. President George W. Bush’s War on Terror, now embraced by President Barack Obama, seems to be more effective in promoting terror than in ending it.

Not unlike his bellicose predecessor, Obama has sold out to Wall Street, Corporate America, the Pentagon, and the right-wing Likud government of Israel. As a result, his political career is in a death spiral. Ironically, there may be one and only one way out for the beleaguered Obama. He must immediately launch a multitrillion-dollar war against death and dying to be financed by an add-on to the Medicare tax which might euphemistically be referred to as a life tax. The objective of the War on Death would be quite simply to make all Americans immortal. It would incorporate the new field of medicine known as transhumanism, described by Joel Garreau in his book “Radical Evolution,” in which advances in genetics, robotics, information technology, and nano technology allow us to improve our intelligence, reinvent our bodies, and possibly live forever.

Given the widespread fear of death among Americans from all walks of life, the War on Death should enjoy broad based support across the political spectrum. The principal reason why the cost of health care is so expensive in the United States is our inordinate fear of death. When the price of health care services is driven by fear of death on the demand side and greed on the supply side, the sky is the limit in terms of how high prices may go.

As we know from our experience with the other metaphorical wars such as the War on Cancer, it is not important whether the objective of the War on Death is actually achievable or not. What is important is that we believe that someday immortality may be possible. Since most Americans still believe “We are the greatest nation in the world,” we will believe anything our government tells us. Just as the government keeps pushing the date for a cure for cancer farther into the future, so too could the date for ending death be pushed forward.

Think of the stimulative effects which the War on Death might have on the U.S. economy. The health care industry would experience explosive growth. But what if Americans either stopped dying altogether or began living a lot longer, say two or three hundred years? Consumption would go through the roof, as well as all forms of environmental pollution. What about traffic and urban sprawl? People would be everywhere! How would we feed all of them? There would be no room left for farms. What about crime and law enforcement? We already have over two million people in prison.

What if the United States had a population of say one billion, or two, or three? What if we did live forever? How would we find meaning? Think of the boredom! How would we keep track of our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, etc., etc.? Perhaps the greatest risk of launching a War on Death is that we might succeed! Then what would we do? We might all become the living dead.”
– http://counterpunch.org/naylor12102010.html
•••
Thomas H. Naylor is a professor emeritus of economics at Duke University. He is the co-author of “Downsizing the U.S.A.” and “The Abandoned Generation: Rethinking Higher Education”, and co-founder of the Middlebury Institute.

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