American Porn by Heathcote Williams
Page 4
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!’
‘G
od 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