AMERICAN PORN

Heathcote Williams

Image © Gee Vaucher

‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.’

— Antonio Gramsci

Smashwords edition

Thin Man Press 2017

Copyright © Heathcote Williams

The right of Heathcote Williams to be identified as the Author of the Work

has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Contents

The United States of Porn

Health Warning

Trump versus Clinton

President Donald J. Trump

The White House Fly

Hollywoodland

Snuff Films at the White House

Mr President

The President of the United States Is Really a Tree

Happy Thanksgiving!

America: How it Works

The Atomic Museum

Septimus Severus

The Dying Bee

Name a Radical Film

The Lion and the Lamb

The President of the United States is Weeping

The Dalai Lama, ISIS and America

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgments to Susan de Muth, John Lahr, Elena Caldera, Colin Gibson, Eddie Mizzi, Rex Pyke, Dave Motion, Lily Williams, Nigel Allen, Graham Yates, Jon Kunac-Tabinor, Carrie Giunta, Paula Finch, Robin Beste, Martin Wilkinson, Simon Drake and Mike Figgis.

Three of these poems were first published in a limited edition of 36 copies by Gerard Bellaart of Cold Turkey Press. A reading by the author of The United States of Porn, recorded by Jan Herman, was released by Sea Urchin Editions in 2013.

©Elena Caldera

The United States of Porn

Amerigo Vespucci, of Florence,

A peddler of pornography,

Gave his name to America.

When Martin Waldseemuller,

A sixteenth-century map-maker,

Was looking for a suitable name

For a particular land mass to the West,

Thought to hold a shortcut —

The fabled North West Passage to India —

Long sought after by navigators who hoped

That it might spare them circumventing the Cape

On that continent’s treacherous, southernmost tip.

Waldseemuller thought at first of calling it the North Indies

(In line with the West Indies and the East Indies),

Until the name of Amerigo Vespucci entered his mind.

Amerigo, a senior steward of Lorenzo de Medici,

Had travelled both to Guinea and to Brazil

And written accounts of his adventures

In which he revealed that, after living with Amazon Indians

For all of two weeks, he had discovered

That his hosts in the rain forest were naked.

This of course was appropriate on their part —

Their being nearer the equator than Florence —

However, Amerigo, their beady-eyed guest, foresaw a market

In the drawing-rooms of Italy for some prurient tales

In which he'd detail their customs and invent some more.

With a tabloid glee he’d make out the Indians to be outlandish —

They frolicked in the sun, had carefree orgies; and fecklessly killed

Unwanted children, on whom, Amerigo would insist, they snacked.

In these fables, the indigenous people were erotomaniac cannibals.

His readers lapped up his exploitational gallimaufry

Set in a paradise untrammelled by Church or State

And his salacious tales became an Italian bestseller.

Even though Amerigo was never in fact to set foot upon it,

Waldseemuller gave what would become ‘America’ his name.

It was just business: Waldseemuller was spicing up his maps

By capitalizing on the notoriety of Amerigo’s accounts.

Thus America, along with its dream, was named after a porn writer

Who worked for the Medici, the mafia of the Middle Ages.

‘In my beginning is my end,’ wrote Eliot in The Four Quartets

And now Amerigo’s bankrupt landmass survives on pornography

And on the profits from the sale of its instruments of killing.

Chatsworth, California, is the HQ of America’s Pornocracy

Where the vulnerable are herded by the voracious

Into the maws of a multi-trillion-dollar industry.

An industry strewn with suicides who’ve lost their identity

To repetitive humping in exchange for money and for drugs

In a forlornly unfulfilled wasteland frantic for a hole to fill.

A new porn video is produced every thirty minutes in the USA

Where ninety-seven percent of all pornographic web pages

Are generated for a global food chain of interlinked Personal Computers.

Phillip Toledano, Photographs of men watching online pornography, taken on January 25, 2011, New York: New York Review

When Adolf Hitler was preparing to invade Poland,

The sinister, lip-smacking troll, Doctor Goebbels,

Hobbled beside him, straight out of a Wagner opera.

Goebbels was an expert on how to debilitate opponents

And, in the case of Poland, he’d make pornography a weapon

Targeting Polish officers in an erotic PsyWar.

They were infiltrated with pornography by the Nazis

As a matter of state policy… for Goebbels thought

That if they possessed it, they’d put up less of a fight.

Goebbels believed pornography worked as an anaesthetic —

His enemies, ironically, could be softened by being stiffened —

And his opponents could be maddened by graphic portrayals

Of their wives, at home, in the Polish officer husbands’ absence…

Doctor Goebbels knew his Freud and his Bernays and his Adler

And how psychosexual mechanisms worked.

Still more is known now through hooking up lab rats

To electrodes that stimulate the pleasure centre of the brain;

If they’re placed in a cage with two buttons to press,

One dispensing food, the other dispensing orgasms,

Typically, the rats will soon starve themselves to death

If they haven’t already died from exhaustion.

Goebbels knew sexual stimulation to be a powerful method

Of social control and that’s why its manipulations are still rated,

Given its soporific effect on consumerism’s lab rats —

Particularly handy in a pre-revolutionary situation

Where levels of inequality exist such as never seen before.

Pornography is capitalism's reward for political apathy.

Pornography is the sensual soma of Brave New World

The insidious tranquillizer that neuters collective action

So that, in the US, few are angered by just fifty people

Having more wealth than half of the entire American population,

And few are provoked by another hundred and fifty new billionaires

Joining the American billionaire club every year,

While twenty million people die from hunger and disease

And while the average billionaire annually spends twenty-five million dollars on food, entertainment, then more food and entertainment,

Enough to feed seventy thousand hungry people for a year.

Imperial Rome spent fifteen percent of its tax revenue on its war machine,

The imperial USA spends fifty-four percent of its tax revenue on its war machine.

Or rather on Defence Contractors — the body guards of an elite —

Because the more money that corporate America hoards,

The more weapons it needs to protect itself…

To protect itself from the consequences of its own actions.

Amerigo’s country is founded on the genocide of its First Nations

And sustained by genocide in countries all over the world.

Amerigo’s country has sponsored serial holocausts

In Central and South East Asia, and the Middle East,

All with the same motive: capturing another country’s resources.

Forty-six percent of children who lose an arm or leg in the world,

Lose it to a weapon manufactured by an American company.

The US government receives $2,650 billion in taxes each year,

Of which fifty-four percent goes towards war and destruction.

‘We are bankers. You are nothing, and when our greed

Gets the better of us, you must help us out.’

The sex toy industry is valued at $15 billion;

It’s enough to provide for the healthcare needs of all women

In impoverished countries. But, ‘We are American bankers,

‘We invest in sex toys. They have a high yield. You are nothing.

‘We are American bankers. We are happiest if we’re making money;

‘Making money by people pleasuring themselves with machines.’

As befits a country named after the Medici mafia’s gopher,

America spends more money on weapons each year

Than the whole world spends on food and drinks.

In 1998, Lockheed Martin refused to give free prosthetic limbs

To children maimed by its weapons.

‘We are American bankers. We invest in weapons. You are nothing.

‘We are citizens of the United States of Porn.

‘We live in an armed Imperialist pornocracy.

‘We are kleptomaniac bankers, you are nothing.’

‘A few thousand miles of cannibal land’ was how Robert Korner,

CIA Adviser to John F Kennedy, described resource-rich West Papua Before the invasion to the benefit of the US Mining company Freeport.

The same allegations of cannibalism as Amerigo Vespucci once made

Allowed the Papuans to be slaughtered by the American empire –

To be treated as unpeople and therefore ripe for exploitation…

Whilst back in the USA, in the cradle of another civilization,

Porn barons bewitch tame porn tribes to act out primitive rituals:

Smeared with baby oil and wearing rubber sheathes, they eat each other.

There are twenty-two million women in the world who spend five hours a day

Collecting water for their children and families.

During the financial crisis there were American bankers

In Wall Street who watched porn for up to five hours a day.

But a marriage between such unfeeling profiteers from poverty

And porn addicts is an ideal marriage since both are bankers

And porn addicts distort the way you love your fellow man.

‘We are bankers, we crunch numbers. You are nothing,

‘We are bankers, you are nothing. Pass the Kleenex.’

Bigger than Hollywood, porn pump-starts the US economy —

The cream-filling in its military-industrial sandwich

Upon which the rest of the world is now force-fed.

Every second in Amerigo-Vespucci-land thousands of dollars

Are spent on porn by two hundred and fifty million citizens

Who look away from their porn screens

And wave wet tissues at their Statue of Liberty

Then smile, slack-jawed, ‘Look Mom, look at what we can do.’

Then it’s back to the screen: porn screens in the White House;

Porn screens in the Pentagon; porn screens in the Supreme Court;

Porn screens in the Senate offices; porn screens in Congress.

Two hundred and fifty million militarized masturbators

Are enslaved by billionaire pornocrats relentlessly promoting

Cybernetic snake-pits of squirming bodies, all gasping,

‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’

While all are in denial: ‘I don’t like cocaine, I just like the smell of it’.

‘It’s got nothing to do with sexual belligerence, it’s harmless.

‘If people want to see people holding women down. So what?’

Romantic arousal is now mediated by favourite porn clips;

One addict confessed to logging on to three hundred vaginas

Before getting up in the morning — indicative of synaptic change.

‘What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death,’

Said Susan Sontag, and she was echoed by J G Ballard:

‘A widespread taste for pornography means that nature

‘Is alerting us to some threat of extinction.’

‘When liberty comes,’ said Wilde, ‘with hands dabbled in blood

‘It is hard to shake hands with her.’ Equally hard to shake hands

With those panting and throbbing due to repetitive stress disorder

Induced by Miss Porn USA and her all-enveloping porn cloud that Governs global weather, despite pornography being as dull as golf.

In the caves of Lascaux, prehistoric man drew penises on stick figures

But they may not have rooted him to the spot while he pleasured himself

For instead he’d leave the darkness of the cave to pursue his own history –

Being sensible enough to know that compulsively playing with himself -

Preying on his own energy and milking himself for hours on end

While watching flickering images - might make him prone to predators.

Amerigo Vespucci, of Florence, a peddler of pornography,

Set his seal on America: trillions in debt; its economy sexualized;

Stealing others’ resources at gunpoint, and unable to feed itself.

‘They are living like parasites off the global economy,’

Vladimir Putin said of America, which now only lacks

William S. Burroughs[i],

Former pest control expert, to describe her final death-orgasm.

Health Warning

Health warning:

Saturation Coverage

Of the US Election

Can cause brain damage.

For nine months

US Supremacism

Indulges itself

In an election

For the US President.

Somehow or other

This always involves

The US electorate

Watching candidates

Spending billions

On trying to persuade it

To elect murderers.

Only the religious slaves

Of a militarized state

Will be elected.

No applications

From pacifists or humanists

Will be entertained.

Four million homeless

Have no representative.

It’s mass murderers

Who are elected

To rule the richest country

In the entire world.

Support for this farce

Comes from people believing

That America

Sets an example

To the world’s democracies

And should therefore have

Mass media coverage

Non-stop, twenty-four seven…

It’s relentless.

Male or female; black or white

It will be a mass murderer

Who is elected.

The moral high ground

Is laid claim to by the world’s policeman

As the mass-murdering begins.

In the US election,

A corporate dictatorship promotes

Its Presidential toy

And the President’s wealth

Is increased by his term of office —

Otherwise, no change.

No one has vision.

It being beyond their Presidential imaginings

To think of a world beyond war.

Trump versus Clinton

November 2016

The total obscenity of the American Dream

Comes to fruition in Donald John Trump:

‘We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal,’

He declared, on his Presidential stump.

What’s wrong is that Trump’s best-selling volume,

On the virtues of property speculation,

Wasn’t written by him but by one Tony Schwarz

(Now dreading Trump as leader of his nation).

The Art of the Deal established Donald J. Trump

As the archetypal successful tycoon.

Schwarz presented him in the best possible light –

Striving to hide a poisonous buffoon.

‘I put lipstick on a pig,’ Schwarz later would say

When overcome with remorse,

For he’d branded Trump as a winning charmer –

One that an electorate could endorse.

Whereas, in his Presidential run-up, ‘the Donald’

Would soon reveal his true colours:

‘It really doesn’t matter what the media write’,

Trump says,

‘As long as you’ve got a young piece of ass.’

Despite self-enchanted claims to be a self-made man

Trump’s wealth has been largely inherited

From father Fred, a slum landlord and speculator,

Who was once notoriously prosecuted

By the US Justice Department for refusing

To rent to African-Americans —

To do so clashed with the beliefs Fred gleaned

From his attendance at Klu Klux Klan ralliesii.

It’s said that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

And so the son is true to Fred’s prejudice

With Donald’s plans to exclude Mexicans with a wall

And to make Mexico pay for the privilege.

Trump’s first wife, Ivana, famously claimed

That Trump was a fan of Adolf Hitler

And that he kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches,

My New Order, in his bedside cabinet.

‘The beauty of me is that I’m very rich,’ says the gilded toad.

‘The point is, you can never be too greedy.

‘My IQ is one of the highest - and you all know it!’

He then changes gear to become simply creepy:

‘I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter,

‘Perhaps I would be dating her.’

If he can sink to using incest as a come-on to gain the White House

What’s to stop such a pervert killing her or perhaps eating her?

When the publisher Random House gave him an advance

Of half a million to write his autobiography,

They sent a mock-up to Trump Towers for his approval –

They’d not held back on the typography:

They’d featured his name, TRUMP, in gold block capitals

With him being depicted as a new Alexander the Great.

‘Please make my name much bigger,’ responded the man

Whose vampirish megalomania was his favourite trait.

Schwarz saw Trump as driven by an insatiable hunger

For ‘money, praise, and celebrity.’

He described him by saying, ‘He’s a living black hole!’

And he viewed his mindset with hilarity.

Trump would proclaim that an apartment

In one of his latest developments

Had been sold to a Prince or a Sultan

To add kudos to his establishment.

‘Prince Charles has bought several,’ he’d insist,

Although there wasn’t a shred of evidence,

But snobs and New York sheep fell for his ploy

And Trump gained his golden recompense.

This mega-vulgarian who blows his own trumpet

So hard you think he’s likely to blow a fuse –

This red-faced Aryan with his combed-over hair

Is a charlatan whose every game-plan is a ruse.

He has three thousand five hundred lawsuits pendingiii;

He takes rides on the ‘Lolita Express’

To a Caribbean island filled with underage girls

Thanks to Jeffrey Epstein, a slave to excess –

A convicted sex criminal, friends with Prince Andrew,

Bill Clinton, and other over-privileged sleazeballs.

Trump joined him as a sex-tourist and an orgy-goer

With a penchant for raping thirteen-year-old girls.

One alleged victim, not named in Court documents,

Claims that during one ‘savage sexual attack’

Trump tied her to a bed, then ‘proceeded to forcibly rape’ her

While she ‘loudly pleaded’ for him to stop.

The billionaire is alleged to have ‘screamed that he would do whatever he wanted,’

Struck her with his open hands then threatened the girl:

‘Were she ever to reveal any of the details of the sexual abuse,

‘She and her family would be “physically harmed if not killed”iv.’

At the age of 22, Trump had four military deferments

To get out of fighting in Vietnam.

He claimed he’d had an ‘uncomfortable bone’ in one his feet

Yet couldn’t remember which foot caused the ‘problem’.

That his millionaire father was instrumental in this great patriot

Avoiding Vietnam was also the truth –

Leaving Trump to say flippantly that his ‘personal Vietnam’

Was to have avoided sexual diseases in his youth.

Trump’s buildings are erected by craftsmen whose bills he often ignores.

His Trump University peddles Mickey Mouse degrees.

Here’s a man who declares war on ‘political correctness’

As it stops him from abusing whomsoever he pleases.

Foul-tempered and violent he singles out hecklers

To be beaten up or pepper-sprayed by bodyguards.

‘I’d like to punch him in the face,’ he says of a protester,

This Neanderthal, and virulently racist blow-hard.

Now imagine Donald Trump in the White House,

Conjuring his self-serving lies out of thin air.

With his sleek little fingers fondling the nuclear codes,

The demagogue grins and mutters, ‘Do I dare?’

‘It’s freezing and snowing in New York – we need global warming!’

Is Trump’s take on an apocalyptic predicament.

‘It’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic,’ says Schwarz,

‘Other than his own self-aggrandizement.’

‘All Moslems should leave the United States now,’

Says Trump on a populist roll.

The US father of a Muslim soldier killed in action

Condemns Trump as ‘a black soul.’

It’s claimed by former MI6 agent, Chris Steele —

Who heard it from the Russian FSB —

That Donald Trump likes to pay prostitutes

To shower him with golden pee.

A recording was made in Moscow's Ritz-Carlton

Of the future President’s urophiliac peaks —

Blissfully unaware while bathing in hookers' widdle,

He was giving new meaning to Wikileaks.

Killary

Donald Trump’s warmongering ex-rival is little better –

A humourless Iron Lady in hock to Wall Street:

Who crows after Gaddafi’s murder by CIA stooges:

Sadistically gloating, ‘We came; we saw; he died!’.

Secretary Hillary Clinton’s emails show that Libya’s plan

To create a gold-backed African currency to compete

With the dollar was the real motive for NATO intervention,

And Hillary’s death squad saw to it that the job was complete[v].

Hillary’s role in the bombing of Libya

As the US Secretary of State

Led to a body-count of over twelve thousand

And to the ISISvi regime of hate.

Clinton leaves a trail of more bloody coups:

Both in Honduras and in the Ukraine.

Appropriately, nine out of ten US arms makers

Are generously funding her campaign.

Despite 400,000 civilians being killed in Syria

This neo-con Mother Kali calls for more.

Unable to mind her own business, she demands

‘Regime change’… which is code for war.

Hillary Clinton’s support for Jihadists in Syria

Would further fuel the Islamic State –

Now with powerful US weapons and equipment

With which to ‘re-instate the Caliphate’.

She has armed Saudis with sophisticated weapons

To carry out genocide in Yemen.

‘The nuclear option should not be off the table,’

She said in relation to Iran.

Bill and Hillary’s private slush fund,

The Clinton Global Foundation,

Gives less than ten percent to charity

Despite its declared intentionsvii.

The Clinton Foundation exists to open the door

To the third world’s valuable resources:

If corporate interests donate to its crooked coffers

Then the Clintons will pressurize world leaders.

If these are the best candidates that are on offer

In the American Petri dish of democratic depravity,

Then maybe it’s time for the system to crumble

And to be replaced by non-violent anarchy.

It’s sick to have billionaires or their puppets

Controlling the future of the species.

American democracy doesn’t count as democracy

But as a notifiable disease.

President Donald J. Trump

World Emperor

‘Donald Trump looks like someone playing a President in a porno.’

– Frankie Boyle, America Autopsy, BBC 2

‘I don't like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.’

– Donald Trump

On buying a beauty spot in Scotland for a golf-course

And for luxury condominiums,

Trump notices some old houses on the horizon

And he orders them bulldozed to oblivion.

On seeing a woman that he desires, he oafishly

Recommends ‘grabbing her pussy’.

He boasts that, ‘My fame lets me take liberties;

‘My fame allows me to abuse her.’

Trump’s grandfather ran brothels in the Yukon

And to his grandson, also, people are for sale.

Trump’s ego tells him he has supernatural powers

And that almost nothing is beyond the pale.

‘I will deport twelve million Latinos’, Donald insists —

This buddy of asset strippers and union busters —

A charlatan who papers over his character’s cracks

With bank loans and with megalomaniac bluster.

Trump was a casino owner (a synonym for gangster),

A suitable past for the President of casino capitalism

Who boasts about who he’s been able to shake down,

And who represents a home grown neo-fascism.

Trump’s a demagogue who’s prone to magical thinking

With a compulsion to build concrete penises

Upon which his name appears in enormous letters

And whose robotic staff repeat, ‘he’s a genius.’

He has pretended to be anti-establishment

And to be standing up for the little guy,

Yet without Wall Street and the Deutsche Bank

This exhibitionist parasite would die.

He’s a slave to his monumental indebtedness.

He owes six hundred million dollars.

But now that he’s President he can pay his creditors,

The mob and their sinister callers —

While doubtless remaining reluctant to pay taxes

For he regards tax evasion as an art.

When challenged about not filing his tax returns

He brags, ‘That makes me smartviii.’

He’s risen to power on the magniloquent claim

That he’ll make America great,

While representing the lowest common denominator

Of his country’s racist hate.

In 1992 Casino Control fined him $200,000

For removing African-American card dealers

From his Plaza Hotel’s casino to appease the racism

Of the Plaza’s big-spending gamblers.

Trump would disparage his black employees as ‘lazy’.

‘I’ve got black accountants and isn’t it funny?’ He’d say,

‘Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people

‘I want are short guys that wear yarmulkes every dayix.’

‘When Donald and Ivana came to the casino,’

Recalls Kip Brown, an employee at Trump’s Castle,

‘The bosses would order all the black people off the floor,’

He told the New Yorker in a 2015 article[x].

Regarding an African-American President

As an affront to his sensibility,

Trump became vocal in the ‘Birther’ movement

Questioning Obama’s legitimacy.

Trump failed to disavow the Ku Klux Klan

When they supported his candidacy;

He’d airily pretend he didn’t know who they were

With an ignorance approaching lunacy.

Donald J. Trump has been elected President

Of the US’s plutocratic pornocracy –

A plot twist, and suddenly the whole world

Is having to adjust to his squalid reality.

He believes women should suffer punishment

If they decide to have abortions.

He sees life as conquest and victory and winning,

As if in a childish competition.

In a half-hearted apology for mocking women’s looks

Trump says he does it ‘to be entertaining’ —

Unaware that he himself is overweight and bright

orange

And hardly qualifies as an oil painting.

‘I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,’

Says Trump who advocates torture.

‘When I say they’ll do as I tell them, they’ll do as I tell themxi,’

Is how he plans to overcome any legal stricture.

Fifty billion tons of carbon dioxide a year are pumped

Into the atmosphere, causing deadly climate change,

Yet Trump says he’ll cancel the planet-saving treaties

The international community has arrangedxii.

Despite the polar ice-caps melting and sea levels rising,

He defies the science on global warming shamelessly

By putting Myron Ebell, a climate-change denier, paid by Exxon Mobil,

In charge of the Environmental Protection Agencyxiii.

So more earthquakes are certain to happen,

And extreme heat will now be inevitable.

One man’s hot air will have consequences

As air becomes less and less breathable.

‘We need some global warming. It’s freezing!’

Trump would joke while he was out campaigning

Then America’s Emperor repeats his strident rhetoric

And his insistence that ‘the swamp needs draining.’

When planning permission for Trump towers in Argentina was withheld,

The President Elect was displeased;

A call from Argentine Premier Mauricio Marci

Was used to urge that planning regulations be eased.

Trump using his office to promote Trump business,

His loose talk of nuclear weapons, make audiences shiver.

Before Donald J. Trump has even been inaugurated

He’s the most corrupt and dangerous President ever.

He may also be the nastiest.

He built a wall to block certain Scottish residents' view of the sea,

As revenge on those who campaigned against his golf course.

He sent them a bill. They refused to pay.

‘Be polite, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.’

Are the paranoid words of General ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis

Which have so impressed President Donald J. Trump,

That he’s made this mad dog top dog, Secretary of Defence.

He threatens to attack ISIS with nuclear weapons —

To use a nuclear sledgehammer to crack a nut —

Unable to see that every Trump Tower would be

Transformed into a radioactive mud hut.

Donald Trump is really Donald Drumpf,

To give him his ancestral, and risible name.

It suggests dumbness, even the passing of wind…

As well as the merciful transience of fame.

The White House Fly

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While the White House is seething with Secret Service special agents,

And weighed down by weapons protecting America’s Holy of Holies,

And as racks of ground-to-air Stinger missiles invigilate its no-fly zone,

An uninvited renegade breaches the saturation surveillance.

On a warm June day in the East Room of the White House,

During a keynote interview with incoming President, Barack Obama,

Expressly set up so he can ‘assess his current media standing’,

A sprightly fly penetrates all the armour-plated security.

A glistening Harlequin, intricately miniaturized —

The anarchic Don Juan of the natural world —

It pirouettes on a sunbeam, speed-dances in mid-air,

Seeking out sweetness to fuel its serenades.

It ascends and descends; skips, zooms and capers

And deftly defies the earth’s gravitational pull;

Then, with its compound eye, it negotiates its way

Past bulky figures and CNBC’s bright lightsxiv.

‘Hey! Get outta here!’ America’s 44th President snaps fretfully;

Addressing ‘the signature characteristic of our Admin- ’

He’s forced to interrupt himself in the middle of a lengthy sentence,

Distracted by the signature buzz of this summer fly.

Anxiously aware of the incoming President’s impatient irritation,

And house-trained to turn trivia into historical events,

His earnest interviewer, John Harwood, declares obsequiously,

‘That’s the most persistent fly I’ve ever seen.’

Regarding the interviewer’s remark as a call to arms, the President strikes,

Swatting the hapless insect on the back of his hand and shaking the corpse to the floor.

‘That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it?’, The President invites approval

Before exploding victoriously, ‘I got the sucker!’

At which the room swells with ‘Jesus!’ and ardent gasps of ‘Nice!’

As all vie to outdo each other with coos of admiration.

‘You want to film that? It’s right there. There it is!’, the President excitedly urges.

He indicates his fallen victim as he lets out a fastidious ‘Yegh!’

And the camera crew focus on the trembling speck on the East Room carpet

For the world to share in the President’s triumphant victory.

Still milking the moment, he alerts his Press Secretary, ‘Did you see that, Gibbs?’.

Gibbs beetles off to ensure that the fly’s death-throes are framed in the most flattering light:

In a voiceover he name-checks the Karate Kid who caught flies with chopsticks

(Though not telling viewers that the Kid’s cachet derived from letting them go).

After America’s new Caesar gives the thumbs-down to a belittled fly

The victory goes viral on global news media

With television’s Coliseum baying, ‘Go for it, Mr President!’

And ‘All flies are evil!’; the commentariat scorns other ways to evict them

For isn’t every President issued with a Free Pass to kill?

Yet no one queries the fly’s ‘bad-guy’ stereotype or wonders if it’s misplaced…

For, as well as breaking down waste to generate topsoil for man’s survival,

Life would be buried under piles of bodies and beneath organic matter

Were it not for the purposeful existence of the President’s present quarry, clearing man’s path.

But, ‘Shoot first, ask questions afterwards’ is the national characteristic;

Though without flies, stomachs would be half-full and spring would fall silent,

With plants from catnip to chocolate-yielding cocoa withering up and dying,

Since flies pollinate… so killing one to show off comes close to self-harm.

Though the Blue Bottle and the Green Bottle aren’t the greatest respecters of persons

Each fly’s agenda matters as much as any human’s, even a VIP,

For while it seeks out plant nectar, it performs symbiotic tasks, just like a bee,

It services most edible crops: onion, carrot, sesame... even coffee and tea.

Less temperamental than other pollinators, and less subject to disease,

Flies are crucial to the life-cycle of lettuce, broccoli, radish, avocado…

They’ve a starring role in the growth of cabbage, peppers, and garlic;

Without flies, no sunflowers, their seeds spiralling in golden ratios — nature’s universal pattern.

The insect is life’s cornerstone. Break it, the building crumbles.

Yet they’re despised, for man hates nothing more than those whom he wrongs.

The fly has mastered the art of living together, thanks to its altruistic social evolution,

And might observe man with some curiosity — trapped below in his concrete mazes;

Fouling his global nest; incapable of flying without crashing and combusting.

Flies stare at him serenely then rub their forelegs, as if in supplication.

For in his concrete colonies, man competes for what he can’t accept he holds in common

And instead, ruins rivals and their shared resources with self-serving greed;

Deadening his co-operative instincts, he submits to the corporate rule of puppet kings:

The hood-ornaments with which he decorates the state-machine he can’t drive.

It’s a machine that reveals its character by its dire jargon: ‘compressing the Kill Chain’…

And the Pentagon now spends a hundred billion dollars to secure dominion

Though, by a quirky irony, when its Empire-building soldiers’ wounds get infected

The best cleansing agent is a fly, whose maggots consume their gangrenous pus.

But, of course, if an inconsequential fly makes you gag with queasy disgust

Then why not just kill it? — though, like the Brave Little Tailor

In Grimm’s Fairy Tales who boasted that he had killed ‘seven at one blow!’

Whoever does so, risks the invitation, ‘Now why stop at flies?’. INCLUDEPICTURE "http://internationaltimes.it/wp-content/uploads/lord-of-the-drones.jpg" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "http://internationaltimes.it/wp-content/uploads/lord-of-the-drones.jpg" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "http://internationaltimes.it/wp-content/uploads/lord-of-the-drones.jpg" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "http://internationaltimes.it/wp-content/uploads/lord-of-the-drones.jpg" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "http://internationaltimes.it/wp-content/uploads/lord-of-the-drones.jpg" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "http://internationaltimes.it/wp-content/uploads/lord-of-the-drones.jpg" \* MERGEFORMATINET

‘The snuff aspect of it, killing the fly, was psychologically useful for Obama…

‘He decided to take it out, and he did take it out.’

The President’s interviewer, John Harwood, later told The New York Times —

Meaning that a violent reaction was the favoured default position.

The Empire’s 44th President had been clear, ‘We’ll lead by building a 21st century military…

‘We’ll have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world.’

And State fear-mongering pumped money into its military personnel,

Two-million men strong; and then into the makers of death-toys

like Raytheon; Boeing; General Dynamics and Schmidt;

And into the electronic warrens of Silicon Valley, where the wired generation

Serves the CIA, the DIA and the NSA — the sulphurous acronyms of repression —

Upon which US citizens spend most of their tax dollars and sponsor atrocities…

For it’s war that drives the US economy, and not the brotherhood of man.

War’s Viagra increases the US economy by sixty percent.

On January 23rd, 2009, Obama gave orders

For the dispatch of robotic flies —

Flying drones befouling the countryside in a vengeful resource war,

Ordered to lay their burning eggs over the Afghan landscape and the Swat valley in Pakistan.

They interrupt conversations. They interrupt the whole social fabric.

They interrupt lives altogether.

And then, with their artificial compound eyes, to spy upon those below,

America’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicles hover above Afghan and Pakistani villages,

Before triggering Hellfire missiles, swatting villagers dead.

The Predator drone’s thermobaric weapons, their fuel-air explosives,

Work by spreading an incendiary mist which then ignites.

A vacuum’s made by a firestorm tearing apart those in target buildings

And bursting the internal organs of farmers in nearby fields.

Mohammed Yaqoob, a Miranshah teacher, reported that, ‘The children are so frightened of drones

‘They can’t concentrate on their lessons. They just sit in the classroom

‘Looking up at the sky where drones continuously hover over the town.

‘They don’t sleep at night. They’re afraid of being bombed in their beds.’

Meanwhile, War Incorporated requires assistance in spinning its atrocities.

Public Relations company, the Rendon Group, helps screen embedded reporters

So military excess can be repackaged as ‘successful surges’, and innocent farmers as ‘terrorists’;

To ensure that America’s war crimes are seen through a rose-tinted corporate media.

And the Pentagon spends $4.7 billion on such public relations:

On what is known as ‘information dominance’

Whereby its ‘information warriors’ neuter all negative images

And sprinkle war crimes with their eau de cologne.

The American public is urged to take an interest in its military and, in March 2009,

At Creech Air Base’s ‘Appreciation Day’ there was a ‘click-and-kill-show’

For taxpayers to study their distant enemies, like insects on a pane, before execution —

Thanks to drone operators showing off their deadly game skills for real.

The air ace who once ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God’

Is now downgraded by the Pentagon’s techno-Taliban

To being a fake flyboy whose ‘situational awareness’ derives merely from hours spent gaming

In American arcades, rather than exploring the ‘wild blue yonder’.

An Air Force pilot now need only be someone trained to sit upright, and who’s mastered Gameboy 2;

Flight-Sim avionics ensure that the robot’s take-off and landing is fully automated.

To the Commanders-in-Chief, the drone warlords zealously directing their squadrons

Of couch potato killers, the Air Force amounts to no more than a Chair Force,

Burning Afghan children and their colourful kites with joysticks.

Predator pilots pretend to be heroes from comic books, vaporizing ‘alien forces of doom’,

Persuaded that they possess superhuman courage with just a screen and a knob.

Elated drone operators yell out ‘Crispy critters!’ on turning electronic outlines to blackened ashes

Programmed to think of as inferior, people whom they can now never know,

Corporal, Rick Reyes of the Marine Corps, would tell Congress in April 2010,

‘Almost a hundred per cent of suspected terrorists turn out to be innocent civilians’;

But the airborne murders did not stop.

Impassioned crowds appear in Islamabad holding up banners:

‘STOP DRACULEAN DRONE ATTACKS’,

‘END THE BLOODSHED OF INNOCENT PAKISTANIS’.

Witnesses described being buzzed by delta-shaped metal flies terrorizing their communities;

Mechanical fangs spitting explosive projectiles, burning their flesh and ending their lives.

At distant bases in Nevada, Predator and Raptor drone pilots with assistant ‘sensor operators’

Sit in a screen-filled office; from here they peep at a colourful, fluttering procession

That moves from the bride’s house to the groom’s…

From here they might hear people singing

The Pashto wedding song, ‘Ahesta boro, Mah-e-man’, ‘Go slowly, my lovely moon.’

But the group at dusk carrying strange instruments signals ‘Red Alert’.

The Pashtun wedding dance, the Attan, once Athenian and before that Zoroastrian,

Has Pashtun men and women spinning round a fire, attaining communion;

But at this wedding, in Farah, it would be a dance of death, finished by swivel seated killers

Swigging sodas and chomping burgers as they send in their gate-crashing missiles.

The wedding song is overdubbed by US explosives;

The wedding’s future offspring killed by a keystroke.

Then, ending their shift, the drone operators use the drive home to Las Vegas to ‘decompress’ —

A ritual in which those battle-hardened by swivelling their Playstation joysticks

Reassure doubtful novices: ‘Rag heads incubate terror.

‘Zapping ’em saves US lives. Gotta be a neat plus, dude.’

A drone survivor in Granai described an aircraft with no pilot that had made a ‘zzzz zzzz sound like a fly’,

And then he added, ‘The bomb’s left people sick. Their mouths bleed when they eat their food.’

He asked, ‘The bomb the Americans used in this place; maybe it’s not been used before?’.

But it has; and it contains Depleted Uranium to cause the same damage to those yet unborn.

Nicknamed ‘termites with thermite’ by their developers and funded by the White House,

Micro-drones, like napalm bats, can now enter buildings and spatter the inhabitants —

They’re programmed to find flesh and to burn it with inextinguishable, chemical flames.

Next to the techno-trolls devising such things, surely a housefly has soul.

For turning war into an electronic tournament detaches it from all human emotion;

And recruiting ads for the military now claim, ‘The frontlines are unmanned’

Since, thanks to PlayStation warfare, spilling blood is only the enemy’s problem:

War’s murder can now be morally neutral, just the technophile’s eye-candy.

At Army Recruitment Centres, war is now presented as ‘war-gaming’xv

Where teenagers are handed out model M-16s

To target Computer-Generated Muslims, or round up ‘Mexican migrants’ at the Border,

And to simulate shooting each of them in the head.

Such games condition a child’s eyes, hands and nervous system

To shoot fast without leaving a moment for reflective thought —

Then, when their electronic fidgeting has erased enough computer graphics,

They can be signed up to cause real deaths on army screens.

‘Kill not the moth nor butterfly’, said William Blake,

‘For the Last Judgment draweth nigh’.

Yet each President’s persuaded they’re as great as a God,

For they dish out last judgments every day.

Keats would glimpse flies in musk-roses… ‘the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves’;

And Proust thought of them as the chamber music of summer promising new summers of the soul;

Sweet, sad John Clare was consoled by their antics, thinking them things of the mind ‘like fairies’;

And Wordsworth loved the creature’s ‘tuneful hum’,

While Blake modestly saw himself as just a ‘happy fly’.

Kit Smart’s ‘Cat Jeoffrey’ would chase and play with a fly till all three of them were

Buzzing and humming with electric joy, cavorting with a seasoned acrobat

dancing upside down on glass; an exotic stranger with honeycomb eyes

And two thousand lenses and no need to be scapegoated

By anyone who can’t see that a fly flags up the life of the day and deserves to be left alone.

Was there a Pashtun Rumi amongst those whom the drones have crushed?

Was there an Urdu Blake whose eyes will never open?

Were there some unwritten dervish poems thermobarically burned?

A Farsi Wordsworth, who’d have praised

Badakhshan’s lapis lazuli — the stone which can bring tranquility to chaos,

The Madonna-blue stone flecked with gold; once

Powdered for pigment, so painters could indicate a gateway to heaven?

To the Navaho, a young man entering adulthood is always visited

By a fly while he’s in isolation in the desert.

‘Big Fly’ whispers answers to questions about the natural order

Which the youth will be asked on returning to the tribe.

But despite another fly’s complex circuitry sustaining bio-diversity,

And being of an intricacy to confound Silicon Valley,

It was judged to have had no place in the television schedule of a politician,

Who impatiently blew its fuses then looked around for applause.

Unlike a fly, the White House is unable to change direction —

Its carbon boot-print firmly indents the planet’s neck

As if ‘God-given’ exceptionalism could guarantee America

Some privileged exemption from the end of civilization.

‘It is a mistake of arrogance to mistake size for significance,’

The Hellstrom Chronicles once declared;

But, according to successive Presidents of the United States,

What’s small can’t be beautiful, just despised.

‘If all the insects disappeared from the earth,’ Jonas Salk has said,

‘Within fifty years life would end… whereas,

‘If all human beings disappeared from the earth,

‘Within fifty years all forms of life would flourish.’

‘We should judge every scrap of biodiversity

‘As priceless,’ E.O. Wilson confirmed;

For, ‘If insects were to vanish, the environment

Would quickly collapse into chaos.’

A chaos presided over by a powerless superman who triumphed over a fly,

Only to find himself ensnared in the darker reaches of the state, and for he himself to fall —

From being the most popular man in the world to one of the most culpable —

A fly who made himself the prisoner of an Imperial web.

Hollywoodland

‘I can’t talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to look back on. When I got away from it I couldn’t even refer to the place by name. “Out there” I called it.’

– Dorothy Parker

‘Hollywood is a place that attracts people with massive holes in their souls.’

– Julia Phillipsxvi

Once upon a time Indian lands were stolen and renamed ‘Hollywoodland’,

Though for ten thousand years this particular stretch of soil

Had been the territory of the Chumash tribe, an American First Nation

Who knew the land by their own name, Kii-Tovar, or ‘homeland’.

After death-dealing land-grabs by colonists lasting four centuries,

There were just a thousand Chumash in Kii-Tovar in 1900,

When all were evicted by force and their land squared off in lots,

With a promotional sign erected; it read Hollywoodland.

The developers’ advertisement had fifty-foot high capital letters,

Illuminated so they could be seen from miles around.

The developers aimed to sell the land for twenty times more

Than they’d borrowed, to exploit their high-handed theft.

Each of the lots on offer was described as an ‘upscale location’

And the remaining Chumash chased off for lowering the tone.

More entrepreneurs were attracted, finding landscape and climate

Conducive to tale-telling and creating cultural myths.

The citrus fruit now grown on the Chumash’s former territory

Would taste bitter to Kii-Tovar’s hunter-gatherer tribe.

The ancestral visions of Chumash shamen were now replaced

By the black-and-white flicker of a mechanical lantern.

Thomas Edison had made ‘an instrument which does for the eye

‘What the phonograph does for the ear’.

Designed, in Edison’s words, for ‘the recording and reproduction

Of things in motion…’ and he’d patented it.

But to save their having to pay royalties on Edison’s patents,

On his machinery and on his film stock,

The new cowboys of celluloid surreptitiously moved to the west

To be just out of reach of Edison’s lawyers.

In 1914 the first feature to be filmed in Hollywoodland

(Soon abbreviated to simply ‘Hollywood’)

Was called The Squaw Man, then renamed The White Man.

It would anticipate the stories Hollywood liked to tell.

In this melodrama a man comes to the US fleeing a murder charge.

Saved by an Indian girl called Red Wing, he proposes marriage.

Later, in the clear, he deserts her on his coming into an inheritance,

Cruelly indicating that she’s unworthy to be a white man’s bride.

The moral implied is that a man may use his fellows with impunity,

Once he adopts misguided notions of his own superiority –

As such views were acceptable to the American Empire’s ‘intelligentsia’,

They were uncritically absorbed by the Hollywood mindset.

To Mark Twain, the author of Huckleberry Finn, the Native American

Was ‘ignoble, base, treacherous, and hateful…

‘His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery,

‘And of low and devilish instincts.’

In Tom Sawyer, Injun Joe acts out of more than just an evil nature —

‘He is evil,’ Twain declares, because of his ‘Indian blood.’

Likewise, after the Battle of Wounded Knee — a prototype for future genocide —

L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, chillingly declared

That he advocated the total extermination of the Lakota people.

Since ‘the Whites,’ he wrote in the Dakota Pioneer,

‘Are masters of the American continent as they rule

‘By law of conquest, and by justice of civilization.’

The ‘best safety of the frontier settlements,’ he continued,

‘Will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.’

Later, in The Wizard of Oz, Baum reaffirmed such thoughts,

The ‘Awgwas’ being his hated Indians, thinly disguised,

‘You are a transient race,’ accused Baum, ‘passing from life into nothingness.

‘We, who live forever, pity but despise you...,’ and he’d rejoice in their demise:

‘All that remained of the wicked Awgwas was a great number of earthen hillocks dotting the plain.’

Baum’s description deriving from photos of Wounded Knee’s burial ground.

Oz’s Yellow Brick Road echoed another crime against the First Nations,

It was their yellow gold, from their Black Hills that created the USA

With its road of golden bricks that ran from the Indian lands in Dakota

To fill Fort Knox and Wall Street and to finance a racist Hollywood

Whose Westerns were show-reels promoting guns to kill Indians;

For Indian characters were always ‘varmints’, as Doris Day sang,

Although, ironically, Indians were routinely rejected for Indian film parts

Since it was decided that they didn’t look ‘Indian’ enough.

Then Hollywood’s self-mythologizing would serve a new gold standard

With its racism morphing into nationalism: ‘USA! USA!’

And its ‘redemption through violence’ proved a strategic ploy

Since inducing fear is essential to the imperializing dream.

Now Hollywood hobbyists and groupies can grade actors they admire

By their body counts, their ‘kills per film’, and one year, in 2010,

Hollywood’s fans would count 23,198,862,496 deaths in 650 films —

Twenty-thousand million bodies to glorify American exceptionalism.

In Hollywood’s eyes, the baddest of ‘bad guys’ are those threatening

To subvert ‘The All-American Way of Life’.

If they refuse to be slaves to a warmongering corpocracy

Then the ‘un-American’ deserve to die.

According to The Los Angeles Times, when the US

Invaded and occupied Afghanistan after 9/11,

The first buildings they opened in the country they’d devastated

Weren’t hospitals, or clinics, or schools…

But movie theatres — playing American films;

Films that would offer escapist fun and sentimental endings,

And redemption through violence, and death to all the bad guys –

Movies that declared, ‘Hollywood’s the capital of the planet!’

Hollywood’s the place where the display behaviour of an Empire

Can get sugar-coated by Hollywood’s happyendification;

Where Hamlets, Romeos and Juliets have their tragedies rewritten

And live behind white picket fences in an LA paradise.

In Hollywood, ‘If the ending ain’t happy, it hasn’t ended yet.’

Issue-based films are only ever made for prestige,

For the studios prefer their moral climate to be unchanging,

Ensuring that what makes money is their core value.

Anti-war films which aren’t a pretext for ‘pigging-out’ on violence

Always prove beyond Hollywood’s capabilities —

For the Pentagon’s in Hollywood to interface with all war films:

It has script approval so that the Empire looks good.

‘Washington and Hollywood spring from the same DNA,’

A Hollywood head honcho, Jack Valenti, revealed;

And Hollywood serves the Empire by making death sexy

And having the morals of someone selling syphilis.

For to run a successful Empire — one with a deadly reach,

Hell-bent on robbing the world of its resources —

It’s handy to lure people into dark rooms and get them used

To watching people dying in large numbers.

Yet Hollywood mustn’t be mentioned without surges of violins

And without lavish sprinklings of glittering stardust

As it pushes its image, and its branded charisma – Hollywood!

Burying those whose hopes it has raised and has crushed.

In a Hollywood church, in this empty Shangri-La, a preacher boasts,

‘The entire world gets its entertainment by watching American films.

‘They may not have food,’ he yells, ‘but they’ll sure watch our films!

‘This is our greatest tool to reach the world for Jesus Christ.’

Outside the church, an anorexic hopeful with dark glasses

Prays she’ll be spotted by the celebrity spotters

Whose job’s to spot celebrities spotting more celebrities

And, yearningly, she looks up at the Hollywood sign —

The Hollywood sign, where once a girl called Peg Entwhistle —

Who’d been on Broadway in a play called The Mad Hopes

And in a murder mystery movie, Thirteen Women,

From which her part was cut, and binned —

A rejection she took deeply to heart — climbed an abandoned workman’s

Ladder to the top of the letter ‘H’…

There Peg stood with tinsel-town, which had failed her, spread below,

And its studio commandants making fortunes from fantasy —

From cowboy porn to war porn, and the pornography of violence —

Then Peg, aged twenty-four, plummeted down like a flightless bird.

‘Peg Entwhistle, the Ghost of Hollywood’.

Daily News illustration 1932

Peg Entwhistle’s body was cremated at Hollywood Memorial Park,

Now called ‘Hollywood Forever’, though some might be tiring

Of a secular death cult with its plutocratic coterie of screen killers,

In a town named after holly — full of pricks and drawing blood.

Hollywood’s most profitable industry is now porn, pure and simple —

People trafficked, people commodified, and flesh pumped

For a sexual anaesthetic, whose value Joseph Goebbels saw:

He distributed porn in Poland prior to the Nazi invasion.

Porn’s social engineering siphons off all oppositional threats:

The disaffected can be neutered by the grinding of flesh,

Intellectually undemanding, emotionless, repetitive and dull;

Endless bodies sprawled on bed sheets, panting for money.

Hollywood now manufactures twelve thousand porn films a week

Using women who’ve failed to become bona fide movie stars;

Every year an estimated twenty-five thousand aspiring actresses

Are sexually exploited by showbiz insiders.

Pornography glues people to screens in an erotic curfew.

Woe betide the US if it stopped spectating,

And if it started to see the world in a new light altogether —

Free from the snares of its mass media’s war-porn.

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In Hollywood movies, almost everyone is svelte, well groomed, and rich;

Outside, America’s homeless shiver impotently in their tents —

Uncelebrated at Hollywood ceremonies, where the crimson carpet

Could easily stand for a century-long smear of celluloid blood.

Snuff Films at the White House:

The Death of Osama bin Laden

The US President

And his Secretary of State

Are watching snuff films.

US Navy Seals

Line up their chosen victims

Then kill them, one by one.

On a Seal’s helmet,

There’s a hidden camera

So that images

Of those they’re killing

Are fed back by satellite

To a viewing room

Inside the White House

Where the US Navy Seals’

Performance is judged

By the President.

Sheikh Osama bin Laden

Topples. Blood squirting.

The Administration

Watches intently. Savouring

This death-orgasm –

This buzz the powerful

Get when causing death, claiming

That they’re still human.

When the audience

Has had its fun, the body

Is dropped into the sea.

Cheers and back-slapping

Follow, ‘USA! USA!’

‘God loves the USA!’

‘The greatest country

‘In the history of the world!

‘High fives all around.’

The US Emperor can’t stop himself there:

Just as all schoolboys enjoy

Pulling wings off flies,

A lens is focused

To watch trophy death-throes

Of an enemy.

As in ancient Rome,

Where crowds bayed for blood and death,

There’s ecstatic applause.

The rule of law’s absent:

No one’s captured. Or tried.

The victim’s unarmed.

‘Let’s watch someone die!’

The commandoes are equipped

To please a voyeur –

‘Kill all his women!’

‘Wave to the White House, baby,

‘We’re filming your last breath!’

‘Hate our freedoms, huh?

‘Hate our Right to Happiness? –

‘We’ll jerk off while you croak.’

Mr President

‘The presidency doesn't exist to exercise power, it disguises power.’

– Anon

‘I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.’

– Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

When Richard Nixon

Was the US President,

He told analysts

Of feelings of dread:

‘When I look in the mirror,

I see no one there.’

Brought up Christian,

He may have thought twice before

Bombing Vietnam –

He must have doubted

His right to decide whether

To end people’s lives.

For, if God exists,

How could you dare to play God?

It would drive you mad.

You’d wake up sweating…

‘I ordered the Pentagon

‘To fire those missiles;

‘I napalmed bodies;

‘I can see white phosphorus

‘Burning holes in flesh;

‘We thought that using

‘Depleted uranium

‘Was a good idea,

‘To harden the shells

‘And make them much heavier

‘So they’d penetrate;

‘I’ve seen the pictures;

‘There are children with two heads;

‘They’re in my mirror!

‘What are they doing…?’

‘Are you talking to yourself

‘Mr President?’

Another President is caught

In the late watches of the night

Going through the same ritual:

‘I ordered those drones

‘And thermobaric missiles

‘That incinerate

‘People in their homes;

‘Our crews shout “Crispy Critters”

‘And burst out laughing.

‘The Kill Teams I sent

‘In droves to Afghanistan –

‘They kill kids for sport.

‘By doubling budgets,

‘I paid for all their bullets

‘And their cameras

‘So US marines

‘Can shoot passers-by for fun

‘And then play clips back

‘And post them online.

‘Victim’s relatives see them

‘And I see them too.

‘As my soldiers shout

‘‘Got it on camera!” I’m their

‘Commander-in-Chief.

‘3rd platoon soldiers

‘Throw candy out of Stryker

‘Vehicles, drive through

‘Villages, shoot kids

‘Who run out to pick up sweets —

“We love Amriki!” —

‘Smiling at soldiers

‘Who then shoot them. Sweets and blood.

“Amriki, Am…” Bang!

‘Can you imagine?

‘I can’t believe I did it.

‘But the old me’s gone –

‘It’s not in the mirror.

‘All of this must go away.

‘I want me back please.

‘Look, I want me back.

‘Bring my old self back, right now.

‘I’m the President…’

‘I’m in the mirror.

‘I’m a very good person.

‘I’m the President.

‘I can do no wrong.’

But cognitive dissonance

And affectlessness

Take a heavy toll

On the man and his image

And they disappear.

For that ‘elect me’ smile

Will morph into a fixed grin

Ignoring torture

And carnage, sponsored

By a thousand US bases

Promoting Empire –

Bombarding Iraq,

Then Afghanistan, Yemen,

Somalia, Libya…

I’m the President who sells weapons,

In exchange for resources,

To inhuman despots

Enabling them

To loot their own countries and to

Murder opponents.

I make the world safe

For hypocrisy, Wall Street

And blood-money madness.

Improbable threats

To the US are detained

Indefinitely,

While kill-lists of US

Citizens are signed off in

The Oval Office.

For a President’s job

Is feeding the war machine

While talking of peace…

A bipolar job.

He farms US tax payers

While promising

That by his spending

Almost all their tax dollars

On security;

On the CIA;

On the State Department, and

On Congress;

On the Pentagon;

On subsidized weaponry

And on the President –

That everyone’s safe

But the truth is, war’s machine

Keeps Wall Street happy.

A black president

Invades Africa and Libyans

Are killed for oil.

The Empire’s demands

Outweigh human values.

It pretends they don’t.

A bipolar job,

Where you kill for a peace prize;

You attack six countries,

You launch cruise missiles

For ‘humanitarian’ wars

With B-2 stealth bombs

Then some fighter jets,

F-16s and F-15s.

‘We’re superhuman!

‘Yo! Geronimo!

‘Give me a high-five dude and

‘We’ll raise the roof-beams!’

Keep Guantanamo

For a concentration camp

Because of ‘bad guys’.

To have a conscience

Now means you’re a terrorist,

Like Chelsea Manningxvii…

A White House mirror

Shows a former idealist

Now slaughtering non-stop.

He finds as he kills

That language goes flat. He speaks

In dull platitudes.

The power-hungry are doomed to starve –

If they feed only on their reflections

In the mass media;

All Presidents grow

Uneasy in their own skins

As their true selves fall

Into the abyss;

Tumbling and losing control.

Their meaning has gone –

Their thoughts are double-think.

Speech-writers write all their thoughts

For them to read out

From an autocue;

Their brain’s on the other line;

They disintegrate.

Their identity’s

Just a chain of feedback loops —

A bankers’ sock-puppet.

Their show’s continuous

Like Groundhog Day — atom bombs,

Agent Orange, drones…

And each President

Is interchangeable in terms

Of their body-mountains.

But when you take lives

You take away your own life,

To join the living dead.

So the mirror’s empty,

Exposing each President

As a lethal illusion.

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Money Brain Stone Heart ©Elena Caldera

The President of the United States Is Really a Tree

A sequoia in the Sierra Nevada is known as ‘The President’.

It’s a three thousand, two hundred-year-old redwood.

It’s two hundred and forty-one feet high, or twenty storeys,

With a billion pine needles that whisper, ‘Beat that!’

It was called ‘The President’ after Warren Harding,

One of the most pointless Presidents ever.

Harding himself admitted, ‘I am not fit for this office

‘And never should have been here.’

By contrast the arboreal President presides over a forest,

And has grown from a thin sapling to thirty feet round.

Like Louis Armstrong, the President’s gone from poor to rich

Without hurting anything or anyone on its way.

Not one of the White House’s serial imposters can say that.

Instead of sequestering carbon, producing oxygen

And refreshing the air, they deliver stale, wooden platitudes,

Scarring the world’s countries with their body counts.

In three thousand years this President’s crushed no bones,

It trod upon no one on the way up;

No one was tortured, no one killed, for this tree to ascend

With its effortless, breathtaking nobility.

Every tree’s relationship with its fellow trees is communal.

Trees warn each other under insect attack:

With chemical triggers, their collective immunity’s strengthened

Without single trees telling others what to do.

Man’s yearning for power and celebrity is rooted in fascism:

The idea of one person being adored by millions

Appeals to those who have their eyes on the seats of control.

But no one’s heard of fascist trees. It’s inconceivable.

The real President is still growing, in amongst its stand of trees

Known to local rangers as ‘The Congress’.

These Congressmen are uncorrupted by corporate lobbying,

They just soar in uncomplicated lines to the sky.

The real President is president because of its virtue

Not because it’s placed there by vested interests;

The fakes are uprooted after four years, or they’re assassinated,

While the real ones live to over three thousand.

In a graph showing the biggest military spenders,

A tall red column represents the United States.

Its six hundred billion dollars a year towers above the rest.

This is what the fakes spend on their trunk of death.

The real President conducts water along taproots,

Two hundred feet long, up to the tree’s top.

The water of life is cleansed and the air is purified

By a tree that’s standing up to the Anthropocene age —

The age in which man is creating a global gear-change,

As threatening as the meteor falls of the Jurassic,

And centuries from now fossils found in the White House

Will testify to the follies of the oncoming age —

The fossilised remains of the dead wood that was pretending

That it was President of the whole world,

Whilst a life-enhancing tree in the Sierra Nevada was outliving them all

And was airily disdaining America’s death wish.

Happy Thanksgiving!

‘The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day; to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England.’

– G. K. Chesterton, Sidelights (1932)

Despite America’s pious self-mythologizing,

This megalomaniac Empire began its career

By eating the corpses of those whose country it had been.

The colony was born from cannibal horror.

Upon landing, the Pilgrim Fathers — the settlers’ Special Forces,

Stern religious fundamentalists from Europe —

Ran out of food and, judging the indigenous people to be ‘savages’,

Arrogantly spurned their kind offers of help.

Instead, the settlers hunted local game to extinction,

And, having no idea of the proper crops to plant,

Were unprepared for what they’d call the ‘starving time’.

In 1609 they faced famine, as well as drought.

They ate their horses, their dogs, their cats and their mice;

They made stews out of the Mayflower’s rats.

Having fished out the rivers, they sought nutrition in leather,

And in desperation they chewed their own boots.

A settler named George Percy would leave an account

Of the Pilgrim Fathers’ life in Jamestown:

‘…Notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe

‘Those things which seame incredible,

‘As to digge upp deade corpses outt of graves

‘And to eate them. And some have Licked upp the Bloode

‘Which hathe fallen from their weake fellowes…’

Percy claimed that these early Americans,

‘Could not wait for their fellows to die before drinking their blood.’

And he recorded that the ‘Extremety of hunger’

Forced these pioneer Founding Fathers ‘secrettly in the night

‘To cutt downe their deade fellowes

‘From off the gallowes and to bury them

‘In their hungry Bowelles.’

The US likes to venerate, if not to canonize, its Pilgrim Fathers

But this nation was created by zombie cannibals.

Being incompetent at growing any food, the settlers

Viewed all Indians as a source of protein,

And those they killed in conflict didn’t stay buried long.

The settler, Captain John Smith, set the scene:

‘Nay, so great was our famine, that a Savage we slew,

‘And buried, the poore sort tooke him up againe

‘And eat him, and so did divers others. One, another boyled

‘And stewed him with roots and herbs.’

The early American passion for eating Indians was widely known:

In a letter to the King of Spain, Don Alonso de Velasco

Describes how they, ‘Eat the dead, and when one of the natives died fighting,

They dug him up again, two days afterwards, to be eaten.’

Again, one Robert Beverley tells how, ‘They eat the bodies of the Indians

‘They had killed; and sometimes also upon a Pinch

‘They wou’d not disdain to dig them up again to make

‘A homely Meal of them after they had been buried.’

Thanksgiving may have celebrated the picking of their first pumpkins,

But this would mask the settlers’ more sinister harvest:

The murder of millions of Native Americans over three centuries –

With every one of them reluctant to, ‘Be my guest.’

One record claims that the first Thanksgiving was held to celebrate

Some settlers escaping from the native population –

From some Pequot Indians angered at their burial sites being robbed

And dead flesh stolen for the Pilgrim Fathers’ delectation.

To justify stealing someone else’s territory

Those early US spin-doctors would misrepresent the Indians:

Just as terrorist Empires now label others terrorists,

They claimed the Native Americans were cannibals themselves.

Nor has the US lost its taste for devouring human flesh:

From its thousand bases worldwide

The Empire has killed thirty million since World War Two,

And gobbled up their resources on the side.

Every year America comes together to celebrate

Its good fortune at Thanksgiving meals.

It eats tons of white flesh smeared with crimson sauce,

Certain that its God blesses how it feels.

Thanks to years of PR, the Pilgrim Fathers belong not to history,

But to a quasi-religious ideal.

Established in wartime as a national holiday, Thanksgiving

Now spawns a patriotic fervour that’s unreal.

‘There is one day that is ours,’

Proclaimed an excited O. Henry, author of The Cisco Kid,

‘Thanksgiving is the one day that is purely American.

‘It’s America’s defining holiday.’

But to less patriotic pundits it’s, ‘Nothing

‘But a toast to genocidexviii’,

A day for indulgence in American exceptionalism,

And in an overweening national pride.

America eats 45 million turkeys on Thanksgiving

(Its President spares one in a facetious ritual).

Thanksgiving is spent eating, and drinking, and eating

And the ‘gross-out’ prompts a modest proposal:

Modern America’s callous division between its rich and its poor

Has left one in seven households ‘food insecure’xix…

Were it to honour its own ancient tradition,

It might dig out its dead rich,

And it might cook them,

And then eat them with impunity.

America: How it Works

‘What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.’

– Simone Weil

The business of America is business

And its number one business is war.

Using Hollywood to peddle its values

It turns the world into its whore.

Its craven citizens are unable to say ‘boo’

Or else they’d refuse to pay taxes.

So, like their media, they back every war

That turns the world into ashes.

The most dangerous country in world history

Is the United States of America:

For it believes in murder to further the basest of ends

While holding its creation by God was a miracle.

But the only miracle is its guilt-free attitude to the holocausts

On which America’s foundation is made:

The Native American genocide that killed twenty-five million

Followed by the North Atlantic slave trade.

It’s made no reparation for something that caused

The deaths of a hundred million;

A third holocaust took place in South East Asia, and one day

America’s body count could touch a billion.

A moral retard it wages war upon its own people

Keeping two million of its poorest in jail.

Its gun fetish sees thirty shot dead every day

In a rogue state that’s now beyond the pale.

When people were asked in a Gallup poll ‘Which country

‘Is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?’

The United States proved to be champion by a very long way –

Top dog, but a mad dog with whom few wished to play.

A plutocratic kleptocracy whose Senate and Congress

Are stuffed to the roof with spoiled millionaires –

Keen for their supposed enemies to be spied on and killed

While Congressmen clutch sheaves of arms shares.

Congress props up the military industrial complex

And regularly lunches with its lobbyists,

Promoting arms and fossil fuels to poison the world.

If blood money gets America oil – why resist?

To America its homeless are a feckless subspecies;

The poor are evicted from America’s Dream,

America’s 1400 newspapers support its every war

For war’s how fat cats get to lick up the cream.

In a plutocracy the wealthy are always above the law.

Take rich Texan teenager, Ethan Couch:

He killed four pedestrians while drunk driving but his lawyer

Pleaded ‘Affluenza’ in Ethan’s defence.

‘A disease,’ he explained, ‘that makes you think that because you’re so wealthy

There’ll be no consequences, whatever you do.’

Couch was acquitted and, likewise, America’s Corporations

Behave with utter oblivion too.

A Wal-mart employee, Jimmy Damour, was killed by a frenzied stampede

At a Wal-mart sale as its Long Island store opened.

Although Wal-mart makes trillions selling its slave labour goods

It refused to compensate a life that its negligence ended.

The wealth gap in America is pre-revolutionary:

Those at the bottom are forced to flat-line

Whilst the one per cent’s spike shoots right off the chart

And the mega-rich cackle, ‘It’s all mine!’

Every day America’s schoolchildren swear their allegiance

To an ubiquitous flag and a feeble constitution

To prompt a sick patriotism that belittles the love of others

And paves the way for American exceptionalism.

‘There’s class warfare all right,’ says the mega billionaire

Warren E. Buffet, ‘but it’s my class, the rich class

‘That’s making the war, and we’re winning.’ — A moral bankrupt

Whose dollar bills read, ‘In Greed We Trust’.

But the quiet voices of common sense sometimes still surface

Such as, ‘We can’t feed the poor but we can fund a war.’

Or, ‘If we learn to share there will be enough for everyone.’

And in history the quiet voices can often become a roar.

The Atomic Museum

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In the National Atomic Museum

At Albuquerque, New Mexico,

You can buy souvenirs of ‘Little Boy’,

The bomb that demolished Hiroshima,

And of ‘Fat Man’, named after the bomb

That flattened Nagasaki three days later.

They come from what the Museum

Calls its ‘Exclusive Collection’:

‘Little Boy’ earrings in sterling silver

Cost twenty-four dollars a pair;

While ‘Fat Man’, the counter clerk says,

‘Comes in at thirty dollars’ as

‘More precious metal is used.’

‘They’re a great seller,’ says the museum storekeeper,

Mike Romero, who assures enquirers,

‘We don’t hold political opinions.

‘We only present the facts.

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‘If you go to a zoo you can buy a stuffed elephant.

‘We are the only atomic museum in the US

‘So we have to sell related merchandise.

‘I don’t think it’s tasteless. It was before my time

‘And it doesn’t strike at my heart at all.’

But the fact that the atomic ‘facts’

(Namely everything being obliterated

Within a three-mile radius of the bombs)

Don’t strike at his heart at all

Evokes DH Lawrence’s unforgiving view —

‘The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.

‘It has never yet melted’ —

Written when Lawrence was living in New Mexico,

Later to become the bomb’s birthplace,

Where a global bully’s big stick

Designed to dish out mega-death

Was first tried out at the Alamagordo test range,

Sowing the seeds of an apocalyptically murderous meltdown —

A mad Empire’s bargaining chip in an unwinnable game.

The ‘facts’ are also that to vaporise two Japanese cities

And to sneak new, distorted sicknesses into man’s DNA

Was the very lowest and most pointless point

In the entire history of humanity on earth:

For the Japanese had been seeking an honourable surrender,

But US militarists, keen to stretch the war into World War Three,

Seized the moment to show Russian rivals who was the Alpha Male

And which of their misguided boffins was the best, ‘USA! USA!’ –

Bang went ‘Little Boy’. Bang went ‘Fat Man’. Then their pandemics of pain

Launched radioactive waves of political paranoia:

Poison clouds, charged with madmen’s thoughts of life on earth being ended,

Hovered over foreign affairs like blood-sucking bats.

In the Cold War the US had bomb-casing arsenals in twenty-seven countries

With the plutonium charges needed to render them nuclear

Hidden in twenty-seven embassies and threatening a hundred holocausts.

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The Atomic Museum was established by Congressional Charter

To indicate the pride the Empire took in its deadly heritage.

Though, when the UK journalist James Cameron

Witnessed an atomic test on Bikini Atoll —

Which would turn the surrounding seas into a desert

(Now lovingly commemorated in the Museum

With ‘Authentic bomb blast goggles, as used in the Pacific

‘During nuclear testing’ being available for purchase) —

Cameron said he thought he could hear a door slam in Hell.

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The Museum’s entrance is guarded by phalanxes of missiles

Pointing, like admonitory fingers: ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’

Four California girls drift round the museum’s Heritage Park.

They paw at the bombs, and stroke the undercarriage of a B-29

Then emerge, giggling, from a mocked-up atomic shelter

To enter an area set aside by the Museum for more ‘Fun Stuff’.

And sprawl over its showcases sizing up the goods on offer.

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There’s a ‘Fat Man’ shot glass, and a ‘Little Boy’ bottle stopper;

Posters of mushroom clouds with palm-trees in the foreground;

Knick-knacks decorated with bombers and their waving crews;

Reprints of the Daily News, ‘ATOM BOMB ROCKS JAPS’.

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There’s a ‘Get a Half-Life’ mug for your favourite beverage;

Atomic hatpins; atomic tie-clips and nuclear golf balls.

The Museum once even had a line in Atomic Bomb perfume

Which presumably didn’t smell like the end of the world.

The laid-back visitors spot the Atomic Museum’s jewellery —

Miniature versions of the huge bombs they just strolled past,

Lying around the Heritage Park like bloated gravestones.

‘Hey, guys. Cute!’ One says, poring over the showcases,

‘Yeah, gotta have them, dude; you think they come in gold?’

‘What about platinum? Platinum would be dead cool.’

For a split second, the word sounds like ‘plutonium’ –

‘Plutonium would be dead cool’, one appears to have said.

Unfazed, with a numb, laconic smile, as if embodying death itself,

The clerk slides the triumphalist trophies and trinkets

Across the counter to satisfy their short attention spans.

‘Miss Atomic Bomb’. Las Vegas News Bureau 1947

All four then sidle out of the shop in the Atomic Museum,

With their bang bang bling now dangling from their ears.

It’s hard not to imagine Cameron hearing another door slam in this obscene hell

As if, returning from one more mission to make fear-mongering fun,

The devil has now resurfaced, perhaps to polish his Zyklon-B paperweight;

Or to buff up his ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ keyrings; or to gloat over Death’s Head kitsch

And to tweak his software upgrade of Nazi Playstation 3.

How he cackles, recalling Mary Meyer, the Washington hostess

Who’d turned Kennedy onto marijuana and to coke-fuelled sex,

And who’d joked with him in a White House bedroom

About his being high when about to press the nuclear button.

So then the devil picks out a roach-end, a condom and a rolled-up bill

And covers them in gold-leaf before giving them pride of place

In one of the gleaming showcases of the Atomic Museum,

Amongst the other imperial souvenirs of nuclear folly.

Septimus Severus

From Ancient Rome to Barbarica:

One step forward, two steps backward.

‘I’ve been everything

‘And what’s the use?’

‘Omnia fui, nihil expedit.’

Said Septimus Severus,

Invader of Caledonia,

Rebuilder of Hadrian’s Wall,

Caesar, and Roman Emperor.

Few modern leaders

Achieve such self-awareness,

Choosing self-delusion

Or self-importance instead.

‘Americans buy war like children gobble candy,’ said Henry Kissinger;

And the Presidential winner

Of the Nobel Peace Prize —

A drone-wielding invader

Of no less than seven countries —

spent a trillion dollars

On refurbishing his nuclear arsenalxx.

Although the American Emperor’s fame has gone viral

His name is surely no longer worth mentioning

For, instead of his despairing of himself,

He preferred having the world despair of a man

Who treacherously used his Imperial power

To steal the world’s tomorrows.

His fame may become fissile in form

With every man, woman and child

On the planet treated to a particle

Of his weapons’ grade plutonium.

Elected on an anti-war platform

He campaigned for a ‘nuclear-free world’

Only to be leaving in his wake

An unstable trail

Of radioactive dust.

The Dying Bee

‘The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.’

— Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi

Weapons are the United States premier export

So the right marketing strategy is called for,

And that strategy for its number one product-line

Is war – mindless and endless American war.

It turns out that in Bush’s build-up to Iraq,

All the so-called ‘reasons’ were irrelevant:

The US and the Pentagon were hell-bent on war

And nothing would put them off the scent.

While more than half of every US tax dollar

Which its citizens pay to their government

Goes to the US’s military-industrial complex,

US citizens comply with such arrangements.

The sole escape for a captive, warmongering citizenry

Is to make war upon their own country:

A tough call since the US is a police state

And its democracy’s really a plutocracy –

Whose rash spending of six trillion dollars on war

Over the last four years,

Whilst 1.6 million are homeless and 16 million

undernourished

Displays a dangerous poverty of ideas.

Their country was once founded upon an idea

But US ‘freedom’ now has a hollow ring:

It’s as free as a dying bee with misplaced pride

In its unlovely and redundant sting.

For the last thirty years, sixty percent

Of the US’s national income

Has gone into the pockets of its richest one percent;

Only to be passed onto its privileged children –

Rich kids who jeer at those less fortunate

On their twittering social media,

Betraying passive-aggressive desires to kill them all off

As they record their feelings of hateful hysteria.

‘How are you white and homeless?’ one whines,

‘What a waste of life and opportunity.’

‘I wonder if homeless people go to heaven.

‘I hate the homeless,’ they add with crass insensitivity.

‘I don’t feel sorry for them. If you want change

‘Then let me throw it as hard as I can at your dirty

face.’

‘I hate when it gets cold out,’ another tweets,

‘Cuz then all the homeless people get on the bus.’

‘I did my good deed today,’ chimes a third,

‘I gave some worthless bum a quarter at the mall.’

‘I was enjoying a latte when I almost vomited.

‘Across the street, I saw a hobo girl.’

‘Get back to your side of the bridge. No one likes you.

‘That’s what I wanted to say.’

‘A bum tried fighting me last night cus I told him

to get a job haha’

‘In all honesty, I kinda don’t feel bad for homeless

people.

‘Each individual is in control of their life

‘And future, so it’s all their fault.’

Another vouchsafes, ‘If homeless people

‘Don’t want to freeze to death,

‘Why don’t they just find homes?!

‘I mean DUUUUHHHHHH.’

‘Never understood why homeless people smell of piss

‘When you can literally piss anywhere.’

‘I hate when homeless people expect us to feel sorry for

them

‘We all have the same 24 hrs.

‘What you chose to do with it is up to you.’

‘If home is where the heart is, then are homeless people

heartless?’

‘All homeless bums are loser drug addict drunks.’

‘Maybe if homeless people took care of themselves,

‘Maybe if they looked pretty,

‘We would want to help them more

‘But I don’t help yellow teeth.xxi’

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Homeless advocate Arnold Abbott, 90, was arrested for feeding the homeless in a park (2014).

Photograph: Lynne Sladky/AP

In a country so devoid of a social conscience

Alien objects are ready to fill the vacuum:

Money; guns; dead food; a fetishized military —

All bypass the need for compassion.

In the US the police arrest people for feeding the homeless

And as a result many homeless have died –

They’ve also been used for random target practice

Revealing the heartless nature of the divide.

It’s a country with a neurotic death wish

Whose police kill a thousand a year;

Its mass media peddle the self-promotions

Of an armed pornocracy living in fear.

If that’s not a pre-revolutionary situation

Then it’s hard to know what is one:

Its rich taunt the poor with their limitless wealth;

The poor are sickened by their destitution.

Meanwhile the pollinating honey bee is dying;

Killed off by the greediest nation in history –

Bludgeoning soil with chemical hammers to speed growth

And polluting air to fog the bees’ trajectory.

Name a Radical Film

‘Where any view of Money exists, Art cannot be carried on, but War only’

— William Blake

‘I so hate the rich. I really cannot bear their company... but to raise dosh [to make films] I would have to court the rich.’

— John Berger on why he decided not to pursue a career in filmmaking

Name a radical film.

And now name another.

Now name a few more.

You can’t name many

Because there are very few.

Films cost a fortune

And to produce them

You have to spend time with rich

People with money.

They aren’t radical,

On the whole. That’s why they’re rich.

So, you eat their food,

You gulp down their drinks,

Laugh at their jokes then maybe

Get driven about

In plush SUVs.

Fly to Cannes in their Lear Jets

Then laugh at their jokes.

Again and again.

‘I didn’t tell you that one

Before?’ ‘Oh, no. No…’

‘Right. Shoot. Let’s hear it.

Give me the log-line. The pitch.

One sentence will do.’

The attention span

Of the rich is very short.

They have distractions.

A radical film

Might be an amusing thought

But they’ll draw the line

At paying for

Their world to be destroyed.

Hollywood’s algae,

That clouds the human psyche

And exudes a poisonous gas

Is spawned by tainted cash:

Money that’s laundered

From stocks and shares

In Third World Labour

By beady-eyed gamblers

On commodities;

In other words, on people’s food.

Then bloated by profits

From oil and from arms

The rich think that it might be fun

To sink millions into films:

To buy some glamour,

To acquire some reflected stardust

To sprinkle on their trophy wives.

Why do films portray

The lives of the privileged

Disporting their wealth,

Looking alluring,

Physically immaculate,

All bought by money?

Why are criminals

So romanticized in films –

Bonnie and Clyde, and Capone?

Because they’re screen projections

Of the feral rich who are

Backing the business.

‘Let’s see the money

On the screen,’ industry

Bosses boorishly demand,

‘Plus lots of weapons…’

For film bloodbaths

Are PR for the arms trade —

For the MIC, the Military

Industrial Complex.

Which has fingers in every pie,

And he who pays the piper

Calls a profitable tune –

A tune whose repetitious hook-line

Drips blood in perfect time:

‘So let’s please see lashings

Of bone-crushing, flesh-tearing

State-of-the-art long-distance

Thermobaric splatter-guns

And lots of them. Repeat.

Lots and lots and lots of them.

If it bleeds, it leads!’ – Just as

In the newspaper business,

War always trumps peace

And no anti-war film

Gets made unless it can provide

The juiciest gore-fest.

Films serve the system.

Watch the extras on a set,

They’re treated like slaves.

Those in the business

Speak in hushed tones of ‘players’ —

Influential elites,

Hard-nosed bean-counters

Who may ‘play’ but aren’t much fun,

As their antennae

Are tuned to wealth, and

To snorting up the souls

Of those they can exploit

In La La Land’s Californian HQ

Where goodness is no good.

‘Okay, so what’s your pitch –

‘The love lives of the homeless

‘Shot in some tent city?

‘Who’s gonna watch that…?

‘And who are you gonna go to

‘For backing? Campesinos?

‘Peasant farmers? Janitors?

‘Maybe my Mexican gardener?

‘Or my Filipino housemaid?

‘Or my Puerto Rican driver?

‘Or my Haitian bodyguard?

‘Maybe they’ll all back you?

‘Get lost you limey schmuck.’

The stifling algae blooms and

Epiphany fades…

Time spent with the rich

Always means losing your edge,

Somehow or other.

When the Lumière

Brothers produced their first films

In 1895

‘La Poste’ in Paris

Foresaw that, ‘When this device

‘Is available

‘To the French public

‘Everyone will be able

‘To photograph those

‘Who are dear to them.

‘Not just in their immobile

‘Form but also in

‘Their movements, and with

‘Speech on their lips. Then death

‘Will no longer be absolute.’

The very first films of all

Were instantaneously

Latched onto by people

As being something hopeful –

A way of dealing with pain

By assuaging grief

And bettering things.

Instead, millions have been killed

For cinema’s spectator sport

And those in the dark

Like mushrooms, quietly curfewed,

Watch death after death

Whilst La La Land’s territorial,

Egomaniac and bully-boy values

Are judged to be sacrosanct:

‘That’s mine! I’m armed.’

‘This woman is mine.’

‘We’re tooled up and dangerous!’

‘You are history.’

‘Give me the money.’

‘Get your sorry ass out of here.’

‘You’re dead meat.’

Vicious and vengeful scenarios

Devised by dysfunctional nerds

Whom no one would play with at school.

Try to quote any dialogue

That says, ‘Why don’t we share this?’

It’s not how the system works.

Name a radical film

That anaesthetizes war,

Sends money packing,

Has real trees growing

Out of the cinema screen

Bearing tasty fruit

So audiences strip

And become possessed by Pan

Then turn into fauns

Leap into the air…

No, they slink out, glazed and drained,

Blinking like mole rats,

Then shake the dust off their feet,

As if the cinema they’ve just attended

Has sick building syndrome.

What if screens were to vanish?

Everyone would still

See what needed to be done

Without the media

Mediating stuff

Twenty-four frames a second —

Or digitally mincing it all up

Into baby food —

Digestible images

That can usurp life

So that people feel like

They’ve done something

If they’ve just watched

A film about something…

When Lee Harvey Oswald

Shot Kennedy he escaped

From reality

To a movie-house…

He hid in a cinema

To feel more unreal.

The Lion and the Lamb

The Metro Goldwyn Mayer lion was persuaded to roar

Then its head was surrounded by a frame

Reading ‘MGM Trade Mark’ as it was suborned into

serving

Hollywood’s moneyed cult of fame.

It roars to further the reach of the American Empire.

It’s there as the Land of the Free’s sad captive.

Its repetitive abuse serves the Empire’s soft power

Whose magic in close-up isn’t attractive.

There are only twenty thousand lions left alive

Throughout the entire African continent.

Rich American trophy hunters pay to shoot them

Then film themselves looking triumphant.

But when nature’s wildness is anaesthetized

And when its stars are decapitated for sport

Then the transmigration of souls may dictate

That man’s most bestial dragons run riot.

Innocent skies now hide diabolical drones

Randomly targeting those below –

Incinerating them with thermobaric bombs

To snuff out life’s luminous glow.

If there are no more wild Kings of the Jungle,

If mechanized man is now the great ‘I am’ –

True visions of peace and paradise will evaporate

There being no lion to lie down with the lamb.

The President of the United States is Weeping

The President of the United States is weeping:

He’s welling up at the news of the death

Of elementary school kids and college students

Due to callous killers stealing their breath.

Since Sandy Hook in Connecticut in 2012,

When twenty children were shot dead,

There’ve been seventy-four school shootings

Yet the writing on the wall stays unread.

To the President such events are inexplicable:

‘How could anyone do such a thing?’

Dim Presidents can cause extreme damage

When the right bells in their brains don’t ring.

Last year, the President was number one —

Number one weapons dealer in the world —

To sign off thirty-six billion dollars of arms sales

It’s essential that your heart be stone cold;

And that your head remain quite oblivious

To your weapons going astray:

For missiles and Humvees end up with ISIS –

Only to attack you one day.

Likewise the kudos and the cash you derive

From your having a militarised mind

Come at a heavy price thanks to karma’s law

Which can bite you hard on the behind.

Your own children can die like the victims

Of those to whom you peddle your toys.

Yet you ensure the income derived from arms

Stifles any and every dissenting noise.

Anyone pointing to the dangers of blowback

Is roundly dismissed as a crank;

Blowback’s ignored because the cries of children

Aren’t able to put money in the bank.

While the President makes a show of weeping

For Sandy Hook Elementary School,

Links between this and the arms trade are clear

To anyone save an all-American fool.

The President is the high priest of a gun cult

Which spawns thousands of devotees

Who shoot thirty thousand a year stone dead

And bring his own country to its knees.

The US arms trade exposes the hypocrisy

Of the President’s crocodile tears

For body counts are trumped by share prices

And fear-mongering profiteers –

Profiteers who hire powerful lobbyists

To visit the White House in droves

And ensure that half the world’s arms sales

Are of the weapons the US so loves.

The US War Machine’s annual budget could buy

Each homeless American a million dollar home –

If the imperial government were ruled by compassion

Instead of a murderous suicide syndrome.

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The Dalai Lama, ISIS and America

The Dalai Lama has said that America created ISIS

Through its use of drones and its waterboard torture,

For the US has exempted itself from the rule of law

And become no more than an international butcher.

Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual leader urged the Administration

‘To alter America’s catastrophic foreign policies.’

He was in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theatre, where he was inaugurating

A festival: ‘Tibet: Traditions, Art, Philosophy and Peace’.

He chided the President for supporting fallacious Saudi clerics

Who claim to represent Islam by siding with cut-throats:

‘Thus they give the radical groups an excuse for their crimes’,

Those who heinously murder the innocent, and then gloat.

‘Several times I importuned President Obama,’

He said, as he outlined his geopolitical fears,

‘To end his catastrophic support for Saudis and their terrorist proxies

‘In the Middle East, but my appeals fell on deaf ears.’

Presidents have been happily photographed bowing to the Saudi King,

For their economy depends on Saudi oil’s poisonous spouting.

Like every prostitute politician each President claims to have vision

As they cravenly capitulate to Wall Street’s touting.

In ISIS’s latest propaganda video — as Saudi oil spurts

Into the gas tanks of American automobiles —

A Yemeni is escorted into the desert by chanting captors.

His eyes and his mouth show the terror he feels.

In Arabic, the lead captor explains to the camera

That ‘the enemy must be crushed’,

Then he bends down to pick up a boulder

And the Yemeni man’s head is smashed.

His eyes are closed in agony as the boulder’s removed.

Gouts of blood jet from his distorted mouth.

The ISIS participants film their victim’s last seconds

As his bloodstained eyes open in terrified disbelief.

The boulder’s picked up, then it’s dropped.

The event is chronicled by ISIS’s Cyber Army.

A remorseless, triumphal chant is added as soundtrack:

‘The soldiers of Allah are ready’.

In the White House’s Oval Office the President of Barbarica

Signs his Wednesday ‘kill list’ with a golden pen

And the enemies of the Imperium are duly dispatched

Through State assassination or a robot drone.

The flow of the President’s pen leads directly

To crimson stains in Yemen’s distant dunes,

But Imperial power is impervious to reason

And the White House can’t read the runes.

In political science as well as in physics

Every action that anybody takes

Has an equal and opposite reaction, like karma:

A drop of blood shed can grow into lakes.

NOTES

i American writer, William S Burroughs once worked as a pest controller, an experience he recounted in his novel Exterminator.

ii Property magnate Fred Trump was once arrested at a Klu Klux Klan (KKK) rally and was sued, in 1973, by the Justice Department for refusing to rent his flats to black people. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/all-the-evidence-we-could-find-about-fred-trumps-alleged-involvement-with-the-kkk

iii Nick Penzenstadler, and Susan Page, ‘Trump’s 3,500 lawsuits unprecedented for a presidential nominee’, USA TODAY, 2 June, 2016

iv Trump accused of ‘savage sexual attack’ on a 13-year-old girl, http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/donald-trump-accused-of-savage-sexual-attack-on-a-13yearold-girl/news-story/6585a49357159ff2fdc3ff3933370500 July 5, 2016. Lisa Bloom, Attorney and legal analyst for NBC News and Avvo, ‘Why The New Child Rape Case Filed Against Donald Trump Should Not Be Ignored’ Huffington Post, 29th June, 2016; updated, July 1st, 2016

v Brad Hoff, ‘Hillary Emails Reveal True Motive for Libya Intervention: Newly disclosed emails show that Libya’s plan to create a gold-backed currency to compete with the euro and dollar was a motive for NATO’s intervention.’ Foreign Policy Journal, January 6, 2016

vi The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (also referred to as ISIL and Daesh) an Islamist entity directly descended from al-Qaeda — itself, arguably, the result of the West’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

vii http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/16/just-5-7-percent-of-clinton-foundation-budget-actually-went-to-charity/

viii CNBC, 26 Sep 2016

ix John R. O’Donnell, James Rutherford, Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump--His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall, Simon & Schuster, 1991

x Nick Paumgarten, The Death and Life of Atlantic City, The New Yorker, September 7, 2015

xi Tom McCarthy, ‘Donald Trump reverses position on torture’, The Guardian, 4 March 2016

xii In June 2017 Trump took the US out of the Paris Accord on climate Change.

xiii To Trump: "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

xiv CNBC is an American cable television broadcaster, part of NBC Universal news group

xv http://www.salon.com/2017/03/11/how-the-us-military-is-using-violent-chaotic-beautiful-video-games-to-train-soldier/

xvi Author of You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.

xvii Born Bradley Edward Manning, Chelsea is a trans woman who was sentenced in 2013 to 35 years in prison for providing Wikileaks with three-quarters of a million military and diplomatic documents in 2010. The leaked material, particularly the diplomatic cables, was seen by some commentators as a catalyst for the Arab Spring.  Manning also exposed a video  which showed two American helicopters firing on a group of ten men in Baghdad, two of whom were Reuters employees. The US Pilots mistook their cameras for weapons, and expressed notable glee at their shooting. This leaked footage caused a sea-change in public opinion about the war.

xviii Steven Evans

xix http://www.povertyusa.org/

xx ‘US begins $1 trillion upgrade of Nuclear Weapons Arsenal.’ International Business Times, November, 15, 2014

xxi All quotes are from actual tweets.

Table of Contents

The United States of Porn

Health Warning

Trump versus Clinton

President Donald J. Trump

The White House Fly

Hollywoodland

Snuff Films at the White House

Mr President

The President of the United States Is Really a Tree

Happy Thanksgiving!

America: How it Works

The Atomic Museum

Septimus Severus

The Dying Bee

Name a Radical Film

The Lion and the Lamb

The President of the United States is Weeping

The Dalai Lama, ISIS and America