Sunday, March 13, 2005
(With apologies to Allen Ginsberg, who first read "Howl" 50 years ago this October in San Francisco.)
I saw the worst minds of my generation consumed by hubris, bloated, self- satisfied, clothed in Armani,
dragging themselves through the Ritz-Carlton lobby at dawn, looking for payback on their campaign contributions,
demonheaded dipsticks yearning for the pork-barrel connection to the dynamo in the machinery of the Pentagon,
who rich and gilded and coke-eyed high sat up scheming defense contracts in the heterosexual brightness of Billy Graham's blessings, contemplating cash,
who scrambled their brains to Mammon and saw Mohammedan devils everywhere guaranteeing power and profits on penthouse rooftops, endlessly,
who passed through universities untouched and untutored, hallucinating Arkansas land deals and their own glory in wars fought with other people's children,
who were graduated from the academies because of their daddies' names, with nothing whatsoever imprinted on the windows of their skulls,
who fornicated in boardrooms in silk underwear burning up other people's money and broadcasting Terror through the wall,
who never got busted though they stole billions, returning from Aruba on their way to Vail,
who ate pate in Vegas and drank Dom Perignon in Palm Beach, partying their patriotism night after night,
with ambitions that made their nation a waking nightmare of booze and boodle, and endless b.s.,
who clamped themselves on the nation's vitals for the endless ride from Wall Street to hell and back on Prozac and Viagra until the grief of parents brought them down, but only slightly, in the drear light of moral goo,
who drank all night in the saloons of D.C., then floated out in the unholy dawn to desolate Baghdad listening to Brooks and Dunn on devices made in China,
a lost battalion of iconic capitalists jumping down like raptors from the ghost windowsills of the Twin Towers, yakkety-yakking screaming vomiting whispering distortions and half-truths and jingoistic platitudes that paved the way to hospitals and jails and war for those doomed to carry out their visions,
who jumped in limousines with Chinese businessmen on the impulse of greater worker productivity and lower wages,
who lounged fat and happy in Houston, and in Dallas, and in Atlanta, seeking yet more tax breaks, following the brilliant Gonzales talking about America and torture, a hopeless task, and so took a cruise to the Caribbean instead,
who reappeared on the West Coast in the guise of Terminator, with steroidic muscles and anorexic wife passing out tax relief to wealthy people recovering from gray democrats in the golden state,
who broke down crying whenever they were criticized, blaming the liberal media for treating them so unkind,
but yowled in delight each time they bought a vote on the Senate floor, wailing down Wall and paving over dis-Union Square,
who peddled patriotism and screwed the public and screamed with joy, but lamented the breast of Jackson, and imprisoned the butt of Martha Stewart, and determined that no pederasts should marry, and
who sang of soaring eagles dreamt by attorneys general and sung by senatorial lackeys on the steps of the nation's Capitol,
who enshrined Limbaugh and bought Armstrong, and leaned heavily on Hannity and danced with the Savage in denial of Absolute Reality,
who fell on their knees like toadies to all who nourished their bottom lines, and took the nation for a band of fools suffering collective lobotomy,
Ah, citizens, while we are not safe, we are told we are, but not quite, and so we stew in the total animal soup of this rotten time,
and listen to the shattered syntax of disordered minds, poor human prose composed of cliches as we stand before power speechless and benumbed and shaking with shame, recognizing the arrhythmia of thought in naked and empty heads,
a madman brat, and the thieves of pensions, and the servants of energy, and stooges of the Pharisees,
we rise, weary, facing more years haunted by the ghosts of robber barons dragging Halliburton in their wake, while the muffled wail of more than 1,500 young ghosts descends from Dover, the place they return unnoted while Moloch dances at balls to honor the Great God of Gelt, and the dread shivers the cities down to the last iPod and the most distant Wal-Mart,
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered, and the nation's soul tainted for a thousand years.
Jaime O'Neill teaches English at Butte College near Oroville.
E-mail us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
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