Saturday, April 14, 2012

Boobie Top-Down Class Warfare

Written six years ago but just as relevant today: the unfolding saga of America reducing itself to passive intellectual incarceration, mesmerized by the moving colored images emanating from a glowing television screen; like the island aborigine Boobies cut off from the world's cultural mainland; like prisoners kept underground who can only see shadows dancing on the walls of their cave and not the marionettes and puppeteers on the elevated stage behind them who produce and cast the shadows that they mistake for reality. In the accelerating economic insecurity enveloping so many Americans today, we can see the usual and historic:

Boobie Top-Down Class Warfare

(an episode of Fernando Po, U.S.A., America's post-literate retreat to Plato's Cave)

It happened back in Vietnam
Some two score years ago
When those within the upper class
Declined to serve, and so
They coined Selective Service to
Select who wouldn't go

They called themselves the brightest and
They called themselves the best
And then they sent their countrymen
Into a hornet’s nest
But not themselves, of course, because
They’d passed the privilege test

These parents of a George and Dick
Thought communism bad
But worried that some other lands
Would find it not as sad
As slaving for the rich ones whose
Rank greed had made them mad

So sympathizing with the rich
No matter what they did
The parents of a George and Dick
Sent someone else's kid
To fight the dreaded communists
No matter where they hid

But not their George and Dick, of course,
They couldn't spare the time
And Vietnam seemed far away
Immersed in war and grime
An atmosphere too turbulent
For orchids in their prime

These studly hot-house orchid types
Worked hard to dodge the light
Their parents helped them jump the line
To keep them out of sight
Arranging for deferments that
Would keep them from the fight

And so the years of war went by
And communism won
Which had exactly no effect
On those who had the fun
Of skipping out and turning tail
To take off on the run

Soon Vietnam recovered from
The blasting it had got
And communists turned businessmen
To hatch a common plot
With those who liked cheap labor
And cared less why some had fought

Still some remained embittered by
The waste made of their lives
And swore they'd never live again
Like worker bees in hives
Content to feed the rich who dined
With sharpened forks and knives

But Boobie schools taught only fraud
And fiction to the young
With fantasy and fables coined
To see the truth unstrung
Till history became a fog
That never bit or stung

On schedule, Boobie Dick and George
Found Politician Town
And learned that pandering for votes
Could win some safe renown
Affirmatively actioned up
They never could fall down

The millions seemed to flow their way
And stuck to them like paste
They spent what others raised for them
With no thought for the waste
Since someone else's money had
The sweetest sort of taste

They made a deal between themselves
To do a pantomime
With Dick to do the thinking while
George mouthed a lisping rhyme
And so with the Supine Court's help
They grabbed for our last dime

The Boobie George then tripped and crashed
Into this truth sublime:
That Boobies hated freedom and
Considered it a crime
Dick told him then what he should do:
Just work them overtime!

With not a moment left to think
The Boobies wouldn’t know
Where all their beads and shells had gone
Or why they couldn’t show
A single thing as evidence
That they had labored so

Once George and Dick gained access to
The treasury’s largesse
It hardly seems surprising that
It soon contained much less
A fact which few observers seemed
To think of with distress

But "stupid is as stupid does,"
The stupid do and say
Confronted by a wealthy thief
They genuflect, then pay;
With eyes and minds shut fast like that
They make such tempting prey

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006

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