‘The presidency doesn't exist to exercise power, it disguises power.’
– Anon
‘I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.’
– Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
When Richard Nixon
Was the US President,
He told analysts
Of feelings of dread:
‘When I look in the mirror,
I see no one there.’
Brought up Christian,
He may have thought twice before
Bombing Vietnam –
He must have doubted
His right to decide whether
To end people’s lives.
For, if God exists,
How could you dare to play God?
It would drive you mad.
You’d wake up sweating…
‘I ordered the Pentagon
‘To fire those missiles;
‘I napalmed bodies;
‘I can see white phosphorus
‘Burning holes in flesh;
‘We thought that using
‘Depleted uranium
‘Was a good idea,
‘To harden the shells
‘And make them much heavier
‘So they’d penetrate;
‘I’ve seen the pictures;
‘There are children with two heads;
‘They’re in my mirror!
‘What are they doing…?’
‘Are you talking to yourself
‘Mr President?’
Another President is caught
In the late watches of the night
Going through the same ritual:
‘I ordered those drones
‘And thermobaric missiles
‘That incinerate
‘People in their homes;
‘Our crews shout “Crispy Critters”
‘And burst out laughing.
‘The Kill Teams I sent
‘In droves to Afghanistan –
‘They kill kids for sport.
‘By doubling budgets,
‘I paid for all their bullets
‘And their cameras
‘So US marines
‘Can shoot passers-by for fun
‘And then play clips back
‘And post them online.
‘Victim’s relatives see them
‘And I see them too.
‘As my soldiers shout
‘‘Got it on camera!” I’m their
‘Commander-in-Chief.
‘3rd platoon soldiers
‘Throw candy out of Stryker
‘Vehicles, drive through
‘Villages, shoot kids
‘Who run out to pick up sweets —
“We love Amriki!” —
‘Smiling at soldiers
‘Who then shoot them. Sweets and blood.
“Amriki, Am…” Bang!
‘Can you imagine?
‘I can’t believe I did it.
‘But the old me’s gone –
‘It’s not in the mirror.
‘All of this must go away.
‘I want me back please.
‘Look, I want me back.
‘Bring my old self back, right now.
‘I’m the President…’
‘I’m in the mirror.
‘I’m a very good person.
‘I’m the President.
‘I can do no wrong.’
But cognitive dissonance
And affectlessness
Take a heavy toll
On the man and his image
And they disappear.
For that ‘elect me’ smile
Will morph into a fixed grin
Ignoring torture
And carnage, sponsored
By a thousand US bases
Promoting Empire –
Bombarding Iraq,
Then Afghanistan, Yemen,
Somalia, Libya…
I’m the President who sells weapons,
In exchange for resources,
To inhuman despots
Enabling them
To loot their own countries and to
Murder opponents.
I make the world safe
For hypocrisy, Wall Street
And blood-money madness.
Improbable threats
To the US are detained
Indefinitely,
While kill-lists of US
Citizens are signed off in
The Oval Office.
For a President’s job
Is feeding the war machine
While talking of peace…
A bipolar job.
He farms US tax payers
While promising
That by his spending
Almost all their tax dollars
On security;
On the CIA;
On the State Department, and
On Congress;
On the Pentagon;
On subsidized weaponry
And on the President –
That everyone’s safe
But the truth is, war’s machine
Keeps Wall Street happy.
A black president
Invades Africa and Libyans
Are killed for oil.
The Empire’s demands
Outweigh human values.
It pretends they don’t.
A bipolar job,
Where you kill for a peace prize;
You attack six countries,
You launch cruise missiles
For ‘humanitarian’ wars
With B-2 stealth bombs
Then some fighter jets,
F-16s and F-15s.
‘We’re superhuman!
‘Yo! Geronimo!
‘Give me a high-five dude and
‘We’ll raise the roof-beams!’
Keep Guantanamo
For a concentration camp
Because of ‘bad guys’.
To have a conscience
Now means you’re a terrorist,
Like Chelsea Manningxvii…
A White House mirror
Shows a former idealist
Now slaughtering non-stop.
He finds as he kills
That language goes flat. He speaks
In dull platitudes.
The power-hungry are doomed to starve –
If they feed only on their reflections
In the mass media;
All Presidents grow
Uneasy in their own skins
As their true selves fall
Into the abyss;
Tumbling and losing control.
Their meaning has gone –
Their thoughts are double-think.
Speech-writers write all their thoughts
For them to read out
From an autocue;
Their brain’s on the other line;
They disintegrate.
Their identity’s
Just a chain of feedback loops —
A bankers’ sock-puppet.
Their show’s continuous
Like Groundhog Day — atom bombs,
Agent Orange, drones…
And each President
Is interchangeable in terms
Of their body-mountains.
But when you take lives
You take away your own life,
To join the living dead.
So the mirror’s empty,
Exposing each President
As a lethal illusion.
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Money Brain Stone Heart ©Elena Caldera
The President of the United States Is Really a Tree
A sequoia in the Sierra Nevada is known as ‘The President’.
It’s a three thousand, two hundred-year-old redwood.
It’s two hundred and forty-one feet high, or twenty storeys,
With a billion pine needles that whisper, ‘Beat that!’
It was called ‘The President’ after Warren Harding,
One of the most pointless Presidents ever.
Harding himself admitted, ‘I am not fit for this office
‘And never should have been here.’
By contrast the arboreal President presides over a forest,
And has grown from a thin sapling to thirty feet round.
Like Louis Armstrong, the President’s gone from poor to rich
Without hurting anything or anyone on its way.
Not one of the White House’s serial imposters can say that.
Instead of sequestering carbon, producing oxygen
And refreshing the air, they deliver stale, wooden platitudes,
Scarring the world’s countries with their body counts.
In three thousand years this President’s crushed no bones,
It trod upon no one on the way up;
No one was tortured, no one killed, for this tree to ascend
With its effortless, breathtaking nobility.
Every tree’s relationship with its fellow trees is communal.
Trees warn each other under insect attack:
With chemical triggers, their collective immunity’s strengthened
Without single trees telling others what to do.
Man’s yearning for power and celebrity is rooted in fascism:
The idea of one person being adored by millions
Appeals to those who have their eyes on the seats of control.
But no one’s heard of fascist trees. It’s inconceivable.
The real President is still growing, in amongst its stand of trees
Known to local rangers as ‘The Congress’.
These Congressmen are uncorrupted by corporate lobbying,
They just soar in uncomplicated lines to the sky.
The real President is president because of its virtue
Not because it’s placed there by vested interests;
The fakes are uprooted after four years, or they’re assassinated,
While the real ones live to over three thousand.
In a graph showing the biggest military spenders,
A tall red column represents the United States.
Its six hundred billion dollars a year towers above the rest.
This is what the fakes spend on their trunk of death.
The real President conducts water along taproots,
Two hundred feet long, up to the tree’s top.
The water of life is cleansed and the air is purified
By a tree that’s standing up to the Anthropocene age —
The age in which man is creating a global gear-change,
As threatening as the meteor falls of the Jurassic,
And centuries from now fossils found in the White House
Will testify to the follies of the oncoming age —
The fossilised remains of the dead wood that was pretending
That it was President of the whole world,
Whilst a life-enhancing tree in the Sierra Nevada was outliving them all
And was airily disdaining America’s death wish.
Happy Thanksgiving!
‘The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day; to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England.’
– G. K. Chesterton, Sidelights (1932)
Despite America’s pious self-mythologizing,
This megalomaniac Empire began its career
By eating the corpses of those whose country it had been.
The colony was born from cannibal horror.
Upon landing, the Pilgrim Fathers — the settlers’ Special Forces,
Stern religious fundamentalists from Europe —
Ran out of food and, judging the indigenous people to be ‘savages’,
Arrogantly spurned their kind offers of help.
Instead, the settlers hunted local game to extinction,
And, having no idea of the proper crops to plant,
Were unprepared for what they’d call the ‘starving time’.
In 1609 they faced famine, as well as drought.
They ate their horses, their dogs, their cats and their mice;
They made stews out of the Mayflower’s rats.
Having fished out the rivers, they sought nutrition in leather,
And in desperation they chewed their own boots.
A settler named George Percy would leave an account
Of the Pilgrim Fathers’ life in Jamestown:
‘…Notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe
‘Those things which seame incredible,
‘As to digge upp deade corpses outt of graves
‘And to eate them. And some have Licked upp the Bloode
‘Which hathe fallen from their weake fellowes…’
Percy claimed that these early Americans,
‘Could not wait for their fellows to die before drinking their blood.’
And he recorded that the ‘Extremety of hunger’
Forced these pioneer Founding Fathers ‘secrettly in the night
‘To cutt downe their deade fellowes
‘From off the gallowes and to bury them
‘In their hungry Bowelles.’
The US likes to venerate, if not to canonize, its Pilgrim Fathers
But this nation was created by zombie cannibals.
Being incompetent at growing any food, the settlers
Viewed all Indians as a source of protein,
And those they killed in conflict didn’t stay buried long.
The settler, Captain John Smith, set the scene:
‘Nay, so great was our famine, that a Savage we slew,
‘And buried, the poore sort tooke him up againe
‘And eat him, and so did divers others. One, another boyled
‘And stewed him with roots and herbs.’
The early American passion for eating Indians was widely known:
In a letter to the King of Spain, Don Alonso de Velasco
Describes how they, ‘Eat the dead, and when one of the natives died fighting,
They dug him up again, two days afterwards, to be eaten.’
Again, one Robert Beverley tells how, ‘They eat the bodies of the Indians
‘They had killed; and sometimes also upon a Pinch
‘They wou’d not disdain to dig them up again to make
‘A homely Meal of them after they had been buried.’
Thanksgiving may have celebrated the picking of their first pumpkins,
But this would mask the settlers’ more sinister harvest:
The murder of millions of Native Americans over three centuries –
With every one of them reluctant to, ‘Be my guest.’
One record claims that the first Thanksgiving was held to celebrate
Some settlers escaping from the native population –
From some Pequot Indians angered at their burial sites being robbed
And dead flesh stolen for the Pilgrim Fathers’ delectation.
To justify stealing someone else’s territory
Those early US spin-doctors would misrepresent the Indians:
Just as terrorist Empires now label others terrorists,
They claimed the Native Americans were cannibals themselves.
Nor has the US lost its taste for devouring human flesh:
From its thousand bases worldwide
The Empi
re has killed thirty million since World War Two,
And gobbled up their resources on the side.
American Porn by Heathcote Williams Page 5