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!