5/12/2013
letter to President Obama #1
Are you my President?
I don’t believe so.
I don’t believe you are even your President.
I don’t believe you are who you want to be
as President.
Maybe you are Michelle’s President,
but mostly I think you are the President your
advisors want you to be, safe, cautious,
intellectual, disconnected, cold, aloof,
outside looking in.
You got to the door of the candy store
but have just stayed at the window
watching
America needs a President who takes risks,
and who cares passionately about something ...
almost anything ...
we can forgive mistakes of passion,
but not fear driven errors of
too much carefulness ..
Benghazi came from that,
from the errors of caution
whenever politicians act with “restraint”,
not risking their “elections”
our public life dies the death of too little too late
they call you a “lame duck”, yet ...
if you paid attention, this is the very
best time to take risks, for your election
in the future is not in play
your party might complain, they want
to own you, and save their own elections
from the vagaries of voters
but you don’t work for them,
your work for us,
for “we the people”
and we need risk taking statesmen
not politicians
not liars and cheats, and
those who put things off until
its to late ...
there is a reason we hate you,
you know ...
and you only have yourself to blame ...
you are dis-likable, and in wanting to be liked
you also kill what we need from you
we don’t need to like you,
once elected and granted so much power
we need you to act
.. . to act you fool
to act!
we need you to be willing to die,
to risk what you ask all our
children to risk,
when you send them off to war ...
we need you to displease the powerful
to upset the wealthy
to make the other weak and lame
politicians crazy
to make the press wake up
to make us all wake up
you belong to the world,
not to Wall Street
or the Democrat Party
You belong to us ...
not even to yourself ...
and, if you are not ours,
then you are nothing
but a vanity waiting for
the fools that write history
to tell pretty stories about you
that will not include how
“we the people” suffered
and starved
and died
the slow death of a thousand cuts
because you lacked the guts to
do the obvious
leave Washington
leave the moral swampland
that festers there and only
grows ugly
and deadly mushrooms
in waters full of decay
polluted by too much money
and lacking any ideas at all of value
Washington is stupid, its inhabitants
a joke for late night comedians ...
you play games and do nothing there,
while we suffer and you have lives the
rest of us need ...
politicians are useless parasites on
the body politic ...
leave Washington
come to us,
ask us for advice,
not your political friends
who serve everyone’s needs but ours ...
take off the suit, and the tie
and the glib bullshit face,
be part of our pain, and let me give you just a couple
actual ideas ... there can be thousands if you
start to pay attention to your poets and
your singers and your playwrights
and your comedians.
roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty,
work in a fast food restaurant for a day,
in a hospice for another day
and in a cubicle in front of a computer
for third ...
know our lives intimately
as an experience, not as a vanity
of imagined liberal fantasy ...
hang out with a gun toting red neck
family, whose yard is full
of old tires and trucks
and useless things
that broke before
their time
sure, use the secret service
to keep you safe, we
don’t want you to die,
we’ve been there before, and done that before ...
but there is no truth in the swampland,
only in the heartland
where real people live and suffer
and age and die ...
Washington is an illusion ...
there is nothing real there at all
nothing ...
to be an actual man of the people,
actually be of the people every day ...
you won’t find the people in the halls
of congress ... just parasites and fools
who believe that by going to Washington
by going to a place of seeming power
they can fix things ...
You know who actually fixes things ...
“We the people” do.
All the idiots that live in the swampland do
is make problems for the rest of us,
while serving the rich and the powerful
and lying to the public
Are you with them,
or us?
If you join with us you’ll have
more real power than any politician in
years, for “we the people” are the engine
which makes America go,
we are America’s muscles and bones
and brains and heart and spirit and soul
and hope and truth ...
Washington is just a cancer that needs to be excised
from the body politic ...
We are life,
there ... in the swampland ... is only death ...
Choose!