Free Speech (cont'd)

Public sector management of aggregate demand.
My marginal propensity to consume approaches unity,
but I have no job, and thus no income. You can't spend
what you don't earn. A government can borrow, but a person
with no credit can't. Ezra Pound reading from his Cantos,
croaking u-sur-ia in a reedy voice. Studied the odes?
Salt lick. Put sweet feed out for deer. There's no such thing
as a free lunch. Your windfall is somebody else's bait.

Today's the first day of Spring. And yesterday was the third anniversary
of the invasion of Iraq. NPR did a round-up of what turned out to be
a history of lies and bullshit. We don't want the smoking gun to be
a mushroom cloud. But how about if the WMD was a rocket launcher
and the yellowcake from Niger was based on a forgery?
President Bush says our present course leads to victory,
increased security for us, and generations of peace in the Middle East.
We can't quit now, we're winning. Is that so, sir?
Cheney says pulling out now would be like giving Germany back to the Nazis,
after we defeated them. I'm not sure who the loser is, but I know who was
the aggressor. I know who misled us. As Nixon used to say,
"I lied to them, but I'm telling you the truth."
I didn't believe him. I don't believe you.
Start at the pointing finger and trace it back.
The bigot in our midst is us.

I was older than the man next to me at the book-signing table
in Fairhope, but our stories were the same, if you substituted
Bush I for Nixon and Operation Desert Storm for Vietnam.
In my books I called it Operation Dalkon Shield. Now comes
Bush II and Operation Iraqi Freedom. A deficit and a recession.
What are we going to do about the budget surplus? The same thing
you did about the Peace Dividend. Spend it. The Social Security
Lockbox. Open, sesame. What elephant? Mr. Kurtz, he dead.
Operation Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. You can't shit the shitter.
Like father, like son. Read my lips. If they're moving I am lying.

During Nixon, I was weighed in the balance
and found wanting in graduate school. I didn't get
my PhD. I became a manual laborer instead.
I worked my way up to technical writer.
During Bush I I lost my house to the bank
and went tango uniform (tits-up). I recovered
during Clinton. Resurrected myself. Now comes
Bush II. I am on a fixed income (social security)
and he's trying to reform that. That is, eliminate it.
I don't have another recovery in me. I don't know about
the economy. Younger workers. They elected him,
or didn't vote. How do you like it now, gentlemen?
Under the spreading apathy, I'll use you as you use me.

My objective is to get at, and witness to, the truth
of who I am through daily typewriting, posting my enema vérité
at The Daily Bulletin, daily, as I write it, responding to email I get
from readers in the next day's entries, in the great long continuous
saga-novel I call my stack, or 40-Year Run, a record of my losing battle with
American letters. Who owns the present controls the future.
I own my own publishing company, Garage Band Books.
I disintermediated.

George Orwell said in Spain he saw
victories reported as defeats, defeats
reported as victories, and some stories
in which the facts bore no relation to the truth
whatsoever, not even that contained in an ordinary lie.
That's corpo-speak. Political propaganda and commercial
advertisements. Writing has been professionalized.
Your credentials are not street cred but an MFA
from a university writing program. You have been vetted.
You have shown you will not upset the applecart,
in order to have a career. Vocation and career
were locked in carnal embrace, and career won.
It was a Pyrrhic Victory. I'd rather be an outsider.
A wanna-be, an also-ran, I am the whining boy,
I don't deny my name. It isn't bragging if
you do it. I created a body of work,
my stack, invented a form to present it in,
daily typewriting, and found a medium to
get it out to the reader through, the worldwide web,
or last resort of the semi-pro.

I'm the last of the pro-am writers,
an amateur who performs at a professional level,
or the first, it could go either way, it has, in the past,
it seesaws, back and forth, as the business cycle
expands and contracts, I'm usually out of sync,
and do better in bad times, and vice versa.
I maintain a level of constant excellence,
or inappropriate or unsuitable, I get them confused,
depending on who's judging, and what axe they have to grind,
what discordant voices to shut up. I'm proud to be rejected by New York.
If New York didn't reject me I would wonder where I'd pulled my punches,
bit off my nuts for a publishing contract, a grant, and a literary prize.
My lifetime achievement is Jack Saunders' stack.

A stack is an unpublished, or underpublished shelf.
Mine stands at 274 volumes, 275 in progress.
This is no mean achievement in a cultural milieu
that wants Jewel, and Maya Angelou. Life Mosaic
Collections. My life doesn't smell nice. It isn't soft.
I'm not pretty, or charming, or inoffensive, or
a token. I am the man, I suffered, I was there.
We all do the best we can with what we're issued.
I had white privilege. I was the oppressor.
But who oppressor is, and whom oppressed?
It seems to me that they're up there and I'm down here.
In the shit. I wouldn't want it to be any other way.
A person who can endure more punishment should.
No man's suffering is greater than nature intended.

It isn't bragging if you do it
and it isn't whining if it's true.
You'd whine too, in my shoes.
I just outline the circumstances,
elaborate, explain. Some say I make
excuses. Maybe so. My explanation is
they're sold-out pukes and I am not.
You pays your money and you makes
your choice. Whom to believe? Me?
Or them, they, dem. The MFWICs.
Motherfuckers what's in charge.
It could be I am paranoid. It could be
they got rid of me and you are next.
I was giving you a warning.
They're the experts but
I had street cred.

Enema vérité is like Naked Lunch:
what you see on the end of the fork
when you really look. Sometimes,
to see what's on the fork you have to eat
with chopsticks. I refer you to
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
The testing instrument loading down
the circuit it is measuring. Observer bias.
Ethnocentrism. Our own perspective.
Our preconceptions and unstated premises.
Enthymemes. Encysted in the brain like
trichinae in the muscles and intestines
causing trichinosis. Don't eat rare pork.
Don't judge others too quickly. What if
it isn't me who's crazy it is the MFWICs?
Start at the pointing finger and trace it back.
Anyone can call another person names.
I accuse you.

Whenever I go somewhere to read,
or pass out fliers, I write a pamphlet
to hand out. Free, gratis, grace related to
charisma. The man with no institutional
basis for his authority, no institutional affiliation.
I am the man, I suffered, I was there. I have the street cred.
Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes,
preconditioned to accept the cover story. Brainwashed by
the media of mass communication. Snow-job and cover-up.
Pipe-dream and wish-fulfillment. You’re so beautiful, your career’s
so hot. You’re so beautiful, your career’s so hot. The red carpet.
Joan Rivers. Larry King. Us Weekly "Oscar Watch." Who was at
Dakota Fanning’s birthday party? The Beat Poet Tour. Garage Band Books
Week 2000. In celebration of Banned Books Week. Who was banned?
I was. Who was not? That’s like being left off Nixon’s enemies list.
To be left off a disgrace. An inexcusable lapse. I was rejected. I wear
the stigma of self-publication like a badge of honor. Here, Julius—hold this.
Apropos of occasional writing, William Faulkner said, "I write
when the impulse strikes me, and it strikes me every day."
Until he won the Nobel Prize for Literature his name
was mud in New York publishing circles.

I joined the ULA to make friends and influence people.
To make enemies and be called a bitter literary also-ran
and a hopeless loser. So far, my strategy is working.
I am identified by the people who oppose what I’m up to.
Insiders and sold-out pukes. Stare at a gnat and swallow
a camel. Hypocrites, lawyers. Woe unto you. You have not
entered, and you kept those who would enter from entering.