my howl

During the Bush years, I wrote this. Sort of still believe it. Although my tie to America has weakened considerably.

I gotta ask sometimes about my own divided sense of, affection for, the Homeland. It’s the crow’s own country for us, which I crisscross in my imagination on black wings, the smell of carrion and white magic in my birdie nostrils. But is it by any stretch of the imagination my country still? Or have I been simply completely fucked out of it? After all, I pepper it with every pot shot in my cap gun, and it would be a fair reading of what I say about these states that I generally view it as a savage hoedown of decrepit holy rollers ruled over by the most thieving gang of imbecile oligarchs ever to drool over a bribe or start a vanity war. So am I yankee doodle dandied out? Or am I in the position of the Pilgrims way back there in the seventeenth century, carrying the cursed language on my tongue but looking for kingdoms other.

Well, pardners, close combat vituperation is as native to the red clay and purple mountain’s majesty in which my testicles dropped as a preacher sex scandal, so there is that. I’m of this country, and take my privileges accordingly. I don’t possess a pair of calipers to measure American wickedness against some other and potentially more moral destination. I weigh it against my expectations, and its own philosophical claims – for what other nation is as philosophical as the U.S.A.? We invented the absolute weapon, then built 40,000 some missiles to convey it, and by that act proclaimed ourselves the end of history and an end in itself. No country was ever bold enough, or fucked up enough, to think so highly of itself as that. We wuz followed up to the heights, sure, but it was us that got there first. What other nation had the brass balls to claim that if, by some godawful chance, we were attacked, we reserved the right to destroy humanity? Okay, the aforesaid Soviets, but that didn’t work out too well for them, did it? The US runs me ragged, but it is way and wicked rich in every material and metaphysical oddity, which is a comfort. Yes, I expect that in my lifetime things will get much harder here for my class (the stragglers and strugglers); I expect the rich shits, whom to lay a sexual name on disparages itself, to acquire ever more power, and the American majority to refuse to do the rational thing and string them up, or strip them down, or in other ways put the fear of god into them. I could say that the Americans of my time just became servile asskissers, but I know the lack of fight is because the majority is tired and is driven by debt like the sinners in some Memlinc hell are scourged by demons. But I also expect wild souls to cross all expectations, who knows how: some minor redeemers, some jammers in the war machine. Sitting in the belly of the beast, I count on some regular people to wake up and pinch it hard. There will be noises off in the American underground, and I don’t want to miss that.”
In a coupla months I am alighting for foreign shores. I’m sorta sick of America, but I still think I stand with both the diss and the hope.