Untitled
December 26, 2000
My generation has been fed lies from birth. Some are obviously bullshit
and the smell gives away the true substance. Love? Well most of us come from
divorced families, Mommy and Daddy hated each other and would only remain civil
until the child support payments came in late. So much for love, unless you
really can believe that you can pull off what your parents didn’t even attempt
to salvage. God? Well, he lost credibility once you realized that the
fat-fingered Southern gentleman with the pompadour and wife in pancake makeup
was talking about an invisible man that lived up in the sky and needed money.
Maybe the first clue was when you got clued into the truth behind Santa and did
a little linear deduction. Or, perhaps, you bothered to actually read the Bible
and decided that the myths and beliefs of an ancient agrarian people really
didn’t apply two thousand years later, with all the advances in science,
technology and rational thought.
Hey, you Jewish folk! Cook pork and it’s edible, in fact, scrumptious!
Yummy! Just another fine product of advancement and evolution: the other white
meat.
Some things are harder to put your finger on though, simply by omission.
Like the labor struggles of the early twentieth century. According to the
history we were spoon fed, we have Henry Ford and his amazing assembly line to
thank for the forty hour work week. No mention of men like Big Bill Haywood, Joe
Hill or any of the other members of the Wobblies, who arguably battled and
achieved more humanitarian working rights than any organization since. No, I
grew up in the Reagan years. Reagan wasn’t much for the working class or even
the middle class. Well, I’ve worked on a non-union assembly line, my brothers,
and it sucked. I’ve worked in the loading dock/blast freezer of a large
slaughterhouse. It too sucked. My father lost his union job at the Kenworth
plant in Kansas City in the early eighties. They took production south of the
border for cheap labor. Of the two places I listed above, one was making auto
parts for GM, causing the United Auto Workers of America to strike, and the
other had fired all union members to replace them with immigrants they paid a
third of the former wage to.
That’s why every time some stupid motherfucker tells me how the
Republicans are going to straighten up the economy, I want to bust their fucking
teeth down their throat. I’ve seen the aftermath of those bought and paid for
sons-of-bitches. Read a history book and they’re fucking saints. Even that
swine, Nixon, is glossed over: “The American people began to lose faith in the
political system as a result of Watergate.”
The man wiped his ass with the Constitution and that’s all you’ve got
to say?
If you’ve never busted your knuckles and back for six-fifty an hour,
sixty hours a week, don’t tell me about a good economy, asshole. It doesn’t
look so great from down below.
Well, we’re headed for four dark years, brothers and sisters. The
treasury will be looted and the wretched will riot in the streets. This
senseless Drug War will continue to incarcerate millions and girls will seek
abortions with coat hangers. Long dead myths will be resurrected to hold legal
power over living human beings.
A virtual shit storm is descending.
The only upside is that we’ll get to keep our guns. And you’d better
bet that as soon as this terrible conscription I’ve placed myself in is over,
I’m gathering my twelve gauge, thirty ought six, forty five and as many rounds
as I can lay my hands on and heading up to a cabin in the mountains of Montana.
Wake me when the bad man is rode out in disgrace from the streets of Washington
like the sick animal that he is. I don’t want any government cheese and I sure
as Hell don’t want to go back to six-fifty an hour for a pint of blood and
gallon of sweat a week.
The Reverend “Lumpy” Mayberry