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. Burroughsi,
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
T
o 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
American Porn by Heathcote Williams Page 1