Do presidents, on the first day of office, alight the yellow bus at 1600 Pennsylvania, down socks, defiantly swagger up the driveway, plastic lunchbox replete with jelly sandwich and apple, sidle to the Resolute desk, penknife poised to carve initials in that grand ancient polish, then stand arrested by a sticky note – seeming innocent reminder in Post-it pink – casually .. no, menacingly placed... ?
Handwriting formal yet loose, style variable but consistently so, pressure light but deep, admits neither control nor abandon. Alarmingly angular, rightward.
Ink still wet.
Inscribed malevolence triggers a dry swallow – eleventh since 1947.
Demands not lunch money. Proviso sans compromise. Cites arrogant Catholic bastard.
There, then, does Earth’s most remorseless plutarchy impassively devour the fresh President?
Generational hope of a nation instant irrelevant road kill. Pulped grinning carcass the cabalmobile’s new hood ornament?
To imagine such crude possibility, how else might mere peasants fathom our leader’s behavior?
I know only the first statesman in decades – an eloquent intelligent orator selling hope to the unfortunate and change to the passionate – shed his masque of noble aspiration with dispiriting ease.
As rent seekers pause not their pillage.
As residents laze in Guantanamo’s tropical climes, as state kidnapping, rendition, and murder extol new patriotism, as War on Terror annexes homeland, as Warshington drums beat belligerence unrepentant, as citizen detention upon corpse of habeas corpus deftly excises 5th, and TSA groping the 4th, as Beltway Tango sets revolving doors a-spinning, as banks that should fail are bailed, foreclosing homeowners, even nations, as borderless drones bugsplat arbitrary evil, as war upon century of war-as-a-racket feather too-wealthy nests, and lesser nations anxiously queue for rough love by the planet’s most pugnacious empire since .. ever?
As this accelerates on the watch of a fleeting great hope, a “Yes we can” statesman-like Negro, now feckless Oval Office incumbent, minstrel in genuine blackface singing tunes of a noxious oligarchy.
I wish not to denigrate Barack Obama the man, the nation’s first African American president, nor have truck with Repugnican shills. This is questioning, pure and straight, of your office, not your self. By comparison, challenging thus your predecessor was like shaming wiseguys for sidewalk spit.
I can guess, well, imagine, to what you assented in that ascent. Though product of the machine, without personal sacrifice and utmost effort Barack Obama would not be President Obama. Any suit would do. A Chicago player, what loathsome swill came irresistibly your way, insinuating requital for favors foul, pedigrees your curriculum vitae.
Along the campaign tightrope your political acrobacy expressed infinite finesse in that surreal circus whose final ring is an Oval Office.
Eight futile years mired in some slimy sea of psychopathic egos, emergence scarred by thorny crown of assured humiliation, shamed in broken promises, fully spent from aimless compromise, destiny chartered as Failed Presidents League member forty four. Compensated by faint praise from elites in whose family business you briefly interned. Or not, if obligatory fall guy .. in the nation’s interest, of course.
SO ..
Why does the President now champion (and it chills me to the bone) America’s boastful pursuit and murder of “enemies of the state” aka U.S. citizens; why is he protective of Guantanamo Bay and the kidnapping that fills it; why does he allow killing by telepresence that callously assigns death to a mere ‘probability’ with collateral family and innocents; why does he continue unjust wars of greed and start new ones?
Why are banks too big to fail but not workers, are laws written by corporations, lobbied through Congress for hire, are financial criminals no longer prosecuted, does the Fed issue debt to mitigate debt, destroy the currency, and my savings?
Why does The President renew, not retire, oppressive emergency powers? Why can a citizen be spied on and tracked with no legal oversight, be arrested and detained without trial, in secret, indefinitely? Why are traveling children searched while elites pass unmolested? Why is citizen protest now terrorism and Internet misdemeanors now cyberwar?
We will never know. So we guess.
Mr. President, the filth and detritus encrusting the soles of your impeccably polished shoes is most telling.
Fetid footprints to and fro that Resolute desk are why America’s greatness is ever its people, never their eternally odious government.
Carpet incessantly shampooed yet bears indelible spoor of elites who think only they can handle the truth.
Ergo, a presidency of suffocating self-righteousness garnished with viperous ruse. A malign sway that dulls armed forces’ steely valor, saps honor of Commander in Chief, nulls the constitution’s grand intent, and pales its aspirant freedom, justice, and egality.
Most offensively, these self-serving footprints render vain the deaths of brave hearts who believed in democracy’s ideal and fought, died, for our flag.
Do you not cringe at ceremonial farce, at vile brazen pig troughs of privilege, at absurd self-parodying motorcades of self-aggrandizement?
Does not warring vague concepts in perpetuity against arbitrary enemies suggest even a mote of burlesque?
The world’s ordinary people, peasants, “folk” your preferred backhander, fear, literally, relentless U.S. global meddling and detest its transparent malevolence.
The United States of America is a joke.
But a particularly feared and healthily respected joke.
Since incinerating two Japanese cities with atomics and numerous others with incendiaries – cities of innocent helpless people – your arms merchants have made unsolicited deliveries to a further 30 countries at your bidding. Prosperous, educated, stable societies with ancient cultures, emergent democracies dawning a new age on Earth, laid waste because their elected leader offended your corporations. Or your psychopathic CIA-planted tyrant gave cheek.
Macabre behavior for a nation proclaimed Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, the world’s greatest democracy. Macabre, Mr. President, is your unashamed power to order death to anyone, anywhere, anytime – like the mafia mobster you thereby become.
So, what is this foolery – the stunting of civilization, the stillbirth of moral humanity – and who does it benefit?
Follow the money.
The money reveals a military and cultural bully loosing on the world self-serving predatory global corporations, creating markets from misery and sickness, wherever they tread.
The money defiles memory of two sacrificed symbols whose square grandeur gilded the City of Ghosts, till their thermitic dust pyres funereally cloaked that melancholy metropolis.
Most tediously, the money always leads to your agents and sponsors. You know, the ones whose gluttonous or murderous swathes through recent history led us to this dark moment.
Did they write that ominous note?