Q: How did you come to be in
A: I took a job out of town, temp-to-perm.
That is how they hired people permanent.
They’d hire a job-shopper on a temporary contract and if you worked out, offer you a job.
Owen was on the road with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver. Balder was in the Marines. Brenda was working at the prison in Wewa and living in a trailer behind Granny Brown.
Later, Balder and I helped he buy a trailer in Wewa, closer to her job, with a well and a satellite dish, and I built a chicken coop for her and put in a garden.
A porch swing on a frame.
We didn’t have a porch but we had the swing.
She lived out in the country.
I thought I would
work until I was 75 and retire to Wewa and be a Wewahitchka,
But the Bush-Enron administration got in and that was it for my plans to retire at 75.
I retired at 62.
I was WMPed.
You been WMPed.
Q: You haven’t been busted, you have been reverted to your permanent rank.
A: Yardbird.
Q: In Pleasures
of the High Rhine, Richard Dobson is watching the Bush-Enron
administration, from
But I didn’t dream of terrorists and the mujahideen; I dreamed government agents were rounding up critics, artists, and intellectuals. I dreamed of Big Brother.
A: I dreamed Corporate Security would be monitoring my web site usage. Looking at what sites I visited on the Internet. Reading my email.
Q: They were. They owned anything you did on your computer. It was their property.
A: My brain was their property.
The language was their property.
They own the language.
Artists don’t own it. People don’t own it. The government doesn’t own it.
The company owns it.
Q: They bought it and paid for it.
A: Yes. It’s theirs and they can do whatever they want with it.
Q: If you object you’ll be sacked and blacklisted.
A: I wrote a pamphlet called A Poet Against the War.
On September 12.
I started it September 11.
I wrote two continuations of it.
Q: Poems about 9-11.
A: Poems about Big Brother.
Poems about the company.
The military-industrial complex.
The military-industrial-academic complex.
Q: Haynes Johnson said his graduate students all told him they were glad he wrote his Blowback Trilogy because they couldn’t. They wouldn’t get tenure.
A: That’s how it works.
That’s how they make it work.
Q: It was not a good time to speak out against the Bush-Enron administration.
A: It’s never a good time to speak out against
the company.
Q: They’re going to fuck you anyway, you might as well have your say.
A: Don’t come in half-steppin’.