Dear Dirty America

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The truth doesn’t set you free. The truth crushes you into powder and you don’t know how or why, you don’t even know it’s the truth doing it, you’re baffled and so go looking for answers and along the way lose your innocence.

This kind of talk doesn’t set well in most circles. No one loves a kamikaze.

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Face your fears — rash advice. People afraid of heights climbing cliffs, what’s that about? No Fear! — buzz words for the upwardly-motivated, the economically well-hung. Madison Avenue slogans for the hip. A stitch in time no longer saves nine, just throw the rag out as soon as its colors fade, there’s more where that came from — in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Peru. And a penny saved is a penny shot in the ass, not a penny earned. The work ethic is for chumps, but we need them, so we cook up jingles to keep them in harness. The stock market eats flesh.

***

Once men climbed mountains with the air in their lungs in big clumsy boots wearing animal-pelt parkas. Now they do it in lightweight synthetic clothing for kicks and endorsements, and the slopes of Mt. Everest are littered with oxygen tanks.

I saw a magazine photo of a cluster of rainbow men planting a flag in the sky. The photo was all asses and elbows. Over-population at the peak of a five-mile-high mountain. Twenty minutes after the picture was snapped, they were dead. A storm came out of nowhere and snuffed them.

The photo lay trapped in the camera, like the voice of a prophet, waiting for the right moment to speak out.