 And
you arrive with your psychoses. Your deeply rooted and fundamental understanding
that land is property. We had never heard of such a thing. It took us
a hundred years to figure out what the hell you meant by that. We weren't
selling you the land for trinkets, we were giving you trinkets, because
you can no more sell a piece of land, a square piece of a continuous
holistic world, then you can sell a cloud or a square of the sky, then
you can sell a part of language and make certain words your private
property. |
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 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, make you afraid of a millennial apocalypse, you afraid of Iraq, afraid of poverty, of abstinence or chastity, not having enough money pumping in your veins that you might circulate in polite society. | |
| 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. |
|
|
Thank you, good God and night bless. |
|
I
am your public.