Every year America comes together to celebrate
Its good fortune at Thanksgiving meals.
It eats tons of white flesh smeared with crimson sauce,
Certain that its God blesses how it feels.
Thanks to years of PR, the Pilgrim Fathers belong not to history,
But to a quasi-religious ideal.
Established in wartime as a national holiday, Thanksgiving
Now spawns a patriotic fervour that’s unreal.
‘There is one day that is ours,’
Proclaimed an excited O. Henry, author of The Cisco Kid,
‘Thanksgiving is the one day that is purely American.
‘It’s America’s defining holiday.’
But to less patriotic pundits it’s, ‘Nothing
‘But a toast to genocidexviii’,
A day for indulgence in American exceptionalism,
And in an overweening national pride.
America eats 45 million turkeys on Thanksgiving
(Its President spares one in a facetious ritual).
Thanksgiving is spent eating, and drinking, and eating
And the ‘gross-out’ prompts a modest proposal:
Modern America’s callous division between its rich and its poor
Has left one in seven households ‘food insecure’xix…
Were it to honour its own ancient tradition,
It might dig out its dead rich,
And it might cook them,
And then eat them with impunity.
America: How it Works
‘What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.’
– Simone Weil
The business of America is business
And its number one business is war.
Using Hollywood to peddle its values
It turns the world into its whore.
Its craven citizens are unable to say ‘boo’
Or else they’d refuse to pay taxes.
So, like their media, they back every war
That turns the world into ashes.
The most dangerous country in world history
Is the United States of America:
For it believes in murder to further the basest of ends
While holding its creation by God was a miracle.
But the only miracle is its guilt-free attitude to the holocausts
On which America’s foundation is made:
The Native American genocide that killed twenty-five million
Followed by the North Atlantic slave trade.
It’s made no reparation for something that caused
The deaths of a hundred million;
A third holocaust took place in South East Asia, and one day
America’s body count could touch a billion.
A moral retard it wages war upon its own people
Keeping two million of its poorest in jail.
Its gun fetish sees thirty shot dead every day
In a rogue state that’s now beyond the pale.
When people were asked in a Gallup poll ‘Which country
‘Is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?’
The United States proved to be champion by a very long way –
Top dog, but a mad dog with whom few wished to play.
A plutocratic kleptocracy whose Senate and Congress
Are stuffed to the roof with spoiled millionaires –
Keen for their supposed enemies to be spied on and killed
While Congressmen clutch sheaves of arms shares.
Congress props up the military industrial complex
And regularly lunches with its lobbyists,
Promoting arms and fossil fuels to poison the world.
If blood money gets America oil – why resist?
To America its homeless are a feckless subspecies;
The poor are evicted from America’s Dream,
America’s 1400 newspapers support its every war
For war’s how fat cats get to lick up the cream.
In a plutocracy the wealthy are always above the law.
Take rich Texan teenager, Ethan Couch:
He killed four pedestrians while drunk driving but his lawyer
Pleaded ‘Affluenza’ in Ethan’s defence.
‘A disease,’ he explained, ‘that makes you think that because you’re so wealthy
There’ll be no consequences, whatever you do.’
Couch was acquitted and, likewise, America’s Corporations
Behave with utter oblivion too.
A Wal-mart employee, Jimmy Damour, was killed by a frenzied stampede
At a Wal-mart sale as its Long Island store opened.
Although Wal-mart makes trillions selling its slave labour goods
It refused to compensate a life that its negligence ended.
The wealth gap in America is pre-revolutionary:
Those at the bottom are forced to flat-line
Whilst the one per cent’s spike shoots right off the chart
And the mega-rich cackle, ‘It’s all mine!’
Every day America’s schoolchildren swear their allegiance
To an ubiquitous flag and a feeble constitution
To prompt a sick patriotism that belittles the love of others
And paves the way for American exceptionalism.
‘There’s class warfare all right,’ says the mega billionaire
Warren E. Buffet, ‘but it’s my class, the rich class
‘That’s making the war, and we’re winning.’ — A moral bankrupt
Whose dollar bills read, ‘In Greed We Trust’.
But the quiet voices of common sense sometimes still surface
Such as, ‘We can’t feed the poor but we can fund a war.’
Or, ‘If we learn to share there will be enough for everyone.’
And in history the quiet voices can often become a roar.
The Atomic Museum
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In the National Atomic Museum
At Albuquerque, New Mexico,
You can buy souvenirs of ‘Little Boy’,
The bomb that demolished Hiroshima,
And of ‘Fat Man’, named after the bomb
That flattened Nagasaki three days later.
They come from what the Museum
Calls its ‘Exclusive Collection’:
‘Little Boy’ earrings in sterling silver
Cost twenty-four dollars a pair;
While ‘Fat Man’, the counter clerk says,
‘Comes in at thirty dollars’ as
‘More precious metal is used.’
‘They’re a great seller,’ says the museum storekeeper,
Mike Romero, who assures enquirers,
‘We don’t hold political opinions.
‘We only present the facts.
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‘If you go to a zoo you can buy a stuffed elephant.
‘We are the only atomic museum in the US
‘So we have to sell related merchandise.
‘I don’t think
it’s tasteless. It was before my time
‘And it doesn’t strike at my heart at all.’
But the fact that the atomic ‘facts’
(Namely everything being obliterated
Within a three-mile radius of the bombs)
Don’t strike at his heart at all
Evokes DH Lawrence’s unforgiving view —
‘The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.
‘It has never yet melted’ —
Written when Lawrence was living in New Mexico,
Later to become the bomb’s birthplace,
Where a global bully’s big stick
Designed to dish out mega-death
Was first tried out at the Alamagordo test range,
Sowing the seeds of an apocalyptically murderous meltdown —
A mad Empire’s bargaining chip in an unwinnable game.
The ‘facts’ are also that to vaporise two Japanese cities
And to sneak new, distorted sicknesses into man’s DNA
Was the very lowest and most pointless point
In the entire history of humanity on earth:
For the Japanese had been seeking an honourable surrender,
But US militarists, keen to stretch the war into World War Three,
Seized the moment to show Russian rivals who was the Alpha Male
And which of their misguided boffins was the best, ‘USA! USA!’ –
Bang went ‘Little Boy’. Bang went ‘Fat Man’. Then their pandemics of pain
Launched radioactive waves of political paranoia:
Poison clouds, charged with madmen’s thoughts of life on earth being ended,
Hovered over foreign affairs like blood-sucking bats.
In the Cold War the US had bomb-casing arsenals in twenty-seven countries
With the plutonium charges needed to render them nuclear
Hidden in twenty-seven embassies and threatening a hundred holocausts.
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The Atomic Museum was established by Congressional Charter
To indicate the pride the Empire took in its deadly heritage.
Though, when the UK journalist James Cameron
Witnessed an atomic test on Bikini Atoll —
Which would turn the surrounding seas into a desert
(Now lovingly commemorated in the Museum
With ‘Authentic bomb blast goggles, as used in the Pacific
‘During nuclear testing’ being available for purchase) —
Cameron said he thought he could hear a door slam in Hell.
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The Museum’s entrance is guarded by phalanxes of missiles
Pointing, like admonitory fingers: ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’
Four California girls drift round the museum’s Heritage Park.
They paw at the bombs, and stroke the undercarriage of a B-29
Then emerge, giggling, from a mocked-up atomic shelter
To enter an area set aside by the Museum for more ‘Fun Stuff’.
And sprawl over its showcases sizing up the goods on offer.
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There’s a ‘Fat Man’ shot glass, and a ‘Little Boy’ bottle stopper;
Posters of mushroom clouds with palm-trees in the foreground;
Knick-knacks decorated with bombers and their waving crews;
Reprints of the Daily News, ‘ATOM BOMB ROCKS JAPS’.
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There’s a ‘Get a Half-Life’ mug for your favourite beverage;
Atomic hatpins; atomic tie-clips and nuclear golf balls.
The Museum once even had a line in Atomic Bomb perfume
Which presumably didn’t smell like the end of the world.
The laid-back visitors spot the Atomic Museum’s jewellery —
Miniature versions of the huge bombs they just strolled past,
Lying around the Heritage Park like bloated gravestones.
‘Hey, guys. Cute!’ One says, poring over the showcases,
‘Yeah, gotta have them, dude; you think they come in gold?’
‘What about platinum? Platinum would be dead cool.’
For a split second, the word sounds like ‘plutonium’ –
‘Plutonium would be dead cool’, one appears to have said.
Unfazed, with a numb, laconic smile, as if embodying death itself,
The clerk slides the triumphalist trophies and trinkets
Across the counter to satisfy their short attention spans.
‘Miss Atomic Bomb’. Las Vegas News Bureau 1947
All four then sidle out of the shop in the Atomic Museum,
With their bang bang bling now dangling from their ears.
It’s hard not to imagine Cameron hearing another door slam in this obscene hell
As if, returning from one more mission to make fear-mongering fun,
The devil has now resurfaced, perhaps to polish his Zyklon-B paperweight;
Or to buff up his ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ keyrings; or to gloat over Death’s Head kitsch
And to tweak his software upgrade of Nazi Playstation 3.
How he cackles, recalling Mary Meyer, the Washington hostess
Who’d turned Kennedy onto marijuana and to coke-fuelled sex,
And who’d joked with him in a White House bedroom
About his being high when about to press the nuclear button.
So then the devil picks out a roach-end, a condom and a rolled-up bill
And covers them in gold-leaf before giving them pride of place
In one of the gleaming showcases of the Atomic Museum,
Amongst the other imperial souvenirs of nuclear folly.
Septimus Severus
From Ancient Rome to Barbarica:
One step forward, two steps backward.
‘I’ve been everything
‘And what’s the use?’
‘Omnia fui, nihil expedit.’
Said Septimus Severus,
Invader of Caledonia,
Rebuilder of Hadrian’s Wall,
Caesar, and Roman Emperor.
Few modern leaders
Achieve such self-awareness,
Choosing self-delusion
Or self-importance instead.
‘Americans buy war like children gobble candy,’ sai
d Henry Kissinger;
And the Presidential winner
Of the Nobel Peace Prize —
A drone-wielding invader
Of no less than seven countries —
spent a trillion dollars
On refurbishing his nuclear arsenalxx.
Although the American Emperor’s fame has gone viral
His name is surely no longer worth mentioning
For, instead of his despairing of himself,
He preferred having the world despair of a man
Who treacherously used his Imperial power
To steal the world’s tomorrows.
His fame may become fissile in form
With every man, woman and child
On the planet treated to a particle
Of his weapons’ grade plutonium.
Elected on an anti-war platform
He campaigned for a ‘nuclear-free world’
Only to be leaving in his wake
An unstable trail
Of radioactive dust.
The Dying Bee
‘The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.’
American Porn by Heathcote Williams Page 6