Tonight I
have come to speak to you of America. I intend to turn the topic inside out through a
mailbox and out the other side. I intend to vacuum the floors of the white house and blow
Niagara Falls through a straw across the state of Arizona. Tonight I will wear the South
Side of Chicago on my head, wrap East St. Louis around my shoulders, and wear Beverly
Hills and Brentwood as shoes. Thus dressed I will parade up and down the boardwalk of
Atlantic city and lead the brokers in a streaming tickertape ballet down Wall Street. I
will pick my teeth with the Washington monument and floss with the St. Louis Arch. I will
mix mai-tais in the Grand Canyon and stir them with the Seattle Space needle. I will take
every famous painting in an American museum and write on the back and mail them as
postcards to friends. I will jumprope with the Alaska pipeline and wash my underwear in
Peugeot sound. I will stomp out the burning industrial fires in Detroit and fuck the
Statue of Liberty, raising above my head a burning copy of the New York Times. I
will invite Cypress Hill, Arlo Guthrie, and Hole over for beef, home fries, and
Marlboros. I will take all the libraries and dump the books all over the state of Texas,
burying all the military bases in paperback copies of Melville and Sapphire and Faulkner
and Ai. I will wear one of Madonna's old outfits and parade down the sunset strip. I will
hitchhike Route 66 carrying a battered gibson and a duffel bag full of drugs and Jack
Daniels. I will ride my horse across the canyon and smoke a cigarette in the fog as rain
drizzles from my fedora. Right after I be everything I can be and make myself anew,
abandoning tradition and forging into the unknown with resolution and integrity. I will
move across social strata as freely as one might county lines, and the erratic flow of
wealth will be nothing to me. I will sample the foods and beverages and literature of
other countries. I will dress in red white and blue, leather jackets, boots, and business
suits. |
With a thundering bassline, I will drive endlessly down nihilistic highways. Unshaven with sideburns and a tshirt, a tattoo and a martini, I will crawl underneath a busted Chevy and restore the engine to order. |
| I will become enscripted in lawbooks. I will have a half-life of 120,000 years and will decay underground like a landfill or burial ground. | |
| I will make slaves build pyramids and I will cross the Delaware and write a grandiose will. Every soybean that is planted will bring me a copper penny, and I might stake my claim and stitch a line across the country with railroad ties. I | |
| I might shoot deer from a helicopter, with an armalite rifle with an infra-red scope. I might bust hippies or Negroes for suspected drug use and bash their heads or use teargas. Two jobs for every man, and a prisoner in every cell. I will keep you safe from dangerous third world countries like Iraq and Panama. I won't even teach you to spell. | |
| For I am the computer, and the atom bomb. I am the machines that build cars and cigarettes. I am lit from within for my electricity is incessant and unerring. I am the microwave oven and the freeze-dried pea. I am Y2K, I smack of civil unrest. | |
| My idea is to alarm you with images of graphic violence to make you afraid of criminals to make you afraid of a millennial apocalypse to make you afraid of Iraq to make you afraid of poverty to make you afraid of abstinence or chastity to make you afraid of not having enough money pumping in your veins that you might circulate in polite society, but at least you don't know your station. | |
| Let me put it this way: I am very loyal to my various teams. The Chicago Bulls, for example. Of course, I mean circa 1997, but they are my favorite season. I am not afraid of elevated railroads or hundred story buildings. I am not afraid of tunnels beneath mighty rivers, or waterways into which tons of garbage are dumped on a daily basis. This land is mine. Nobody was using it for anything anyway. I like the parts with mountains and earthquakes and warm temperatures. | |
| I have given birth to a great many mistakes, which must have been God's will, or the will of tremendous men like William Gates or William Gaddis. Don't believe anything you read, by the way, I hate writers and they me. For this we turn to the works of Vonnegut, Lorde. | |
| The time is my problem, I do not want to get old and grey like Europe. If I ever had a rich cultural heritage I'd kill myself: I hate school. And I sure don't want to be environmentally sustainable although a few of my children are hippies. Because they had too much book learning is what. I ain't heavy, I'm my brother can you spare a dime? I'm the West Side, Oklahoma, Chicago, New York New York, Chattanooga, and other places I have already named. I don't want to be like my parents. I have a new fighter plane maybe I will fly it through your no-fly zone sometime so you can see it. | |
 I wouldn't be here if I had a better navigator. I didn't want paradise, I
wanted trade routes. You should have seen those guys slaughter the indigenous peoples. It
wasn't pretty. You've never seen anything like it, not even on TV, it was bloodier and
more frivolous and numb and blunt and savage then anything you can let yourself imagine
even in your worst nightmare when you are drowning in some undertow a mile off the tip of
the peninsula of reason, when you are raping and beheading those who share with you
everything they have. |
|
| Try to explain to the Choctaw or Iroquois or Cherokee or Illiniwek that Michael Jackson now owns all the Beatles' songs. It was hard to enough to understand that the Beatles owned their own songs, those songs everybody knows by heart. Try to sell a river, or a rock, or a plot. Try to write in a language that makes the ridiculous verifiable. | |
| I am your coffee, donuts, newspapers. I am your taxis, jetplanes, subways. I am your goatee, your jazz, your aerosol cans, your barbecue grills, your electric guitar. I am your civil liberties and riot troops. | |
| I
am your public. Thank you, good god and night bless. |
|
