Got My Pickup Truck On

It sits up so high I got me an extry step and a grab bar just so the old lady can make it in

I just toss them groceries up in there on the floor behind the back seat somewheres

It’s got way over 300 horsepower and I paid 1500 bucks for a man’s booming exhaust

Handles like a real fat guy walks and looks about as aerodynamic as an aging bulldog

I get up real close behind them veggie fuckheads and like threaten ‘em in their little greenie cars

I show them what I got out there on the freeway too, and ta hell with savin diesel

I like to drive alone with nothing at all in my shiny pickup bed that’s always clean and empty

Got lots of towing power for my snow machines, power boats, dirt bikes and OHVs

It’s a 4x4 by god, with lotsa off-road clearance - and I use it for my daily 50 mile commute

No, I don’t know how to fix it and I leave the maintenance to the high-priced pros

Got temperature and wind speed readouts so I can always leave the windows up

The image I like to project is one of a deep-voiced faceless strength and an overwhelming force

I have the need to gun it and show that I can keep up despite my portly profile

Goddamn! it gives me true pleasure to sit up there so high looking down from that potent cab

But, the new ones are way better and I wanna trade in again, even before my lease is up

The diesel’s got a manly smell and I like to burp up smoke all over them stupid cyclists

It costs me a hefty premium, but I’m proud to fill ‘er up just like the big rigs do

Makes a damn smooth air-conditioner when the little lady has to run in somewhere fer 10 minutes

I can, by god, keep up with traffic and I will always exceed the speed limit

Never bothered to check the mileage and, you know what, I really don’t give a good gotdamn

Paid a bunch of money to have all that stupid smog shit ripped right out and had her chipped, too

Got a yellow ribbon “Support Our Troops” decal on that muscular back bumper

Tires cost $300 apiece and the off-road tread makes some real noise out on the innerstate

Cat and dogs don’t fuck with me cause they see I’ll never even slow down fer them, at all

It’s got a back seat with lots of room fer the kids and whatever shit like that

I got a big old crash bar in the front in case I gotta just shove some puny SUVs aside

I’m 5’8” but she’s a cool 20 feet in length - and I really got my pickup truck on!

Weighs a svelte 16000 pounds, perfect for hauling groceries and heading in ta work

It’s got more torque than all them others and some day I’ll figure out just what the hell that is

Why, I just aint afraida nothin when I’m jacked all up in there behind the wheel

Got country music on the satellite radio and a DVD player for the kids

Why, the cup holders are even big enough for my 32 oz Mountain Dew

They say the insurance is really high but, hell, I’ve never owned no fuckin little Honda, anyways

I’m part of a bigger team of strong, silent guys like on TV who get dirty pulling stuff around

This is a big part of my freedom and she comes in at about $60 grand, right now

It’s our family battle wagon and we are rough and always ready in case of any trouble at the apts.

Goddamn does it feel good when I lay on the air horn all up into some puny import

I think that women mostly react more favorably to me when I’m up there behind its wheel

I’m part lonely cowboy, dirty soldier, burly football player and this rig suits me just fine

I back with a slow and corpulent dignity into a mere space and a half

Taking off from a light I gleefully dump more emissions than a hybrid does all day

I drive 80,000 miles a year so I need somethin big that don’t hurt my back

I could put on a snowplow or get a winch and pull out stranded mini-vans

Two or three of my snarling, grimy dirtbikes fit right up there in the back

My stainless steel toolbox looks great locked up tight right behind the cab

Got me a lift kit and 37” tires so you can see way up under my chromed suspension parts

Stay back and give me room, I’m really big and I need my space

This fucker’s the macho way to carry my goddamn holy Harley

It’s so terribly big and bulging I can’t hardly believe it sometimes, myself

I love to pass little cars on rainy days and cut ‘em off with a big old dirty spray

This baby has huge muscles of steel and the hood is so fucking shiny it almost hurts

I speed up when somebody pulls out somewhere up there in front of me

Don’t even let off when they turn left across the lane that I own

I just see how close I can come when I turn on past them at a stoplight

I can swerve lanes to pass on the right just like my favorite NASCAR pickups on TV

You just ought to hear that humma roar when I let it out to pass on the two lane

I back her in real close at night cause she’s our best defense in case of trouble

I always loved them big red fire trucks when I was a little kid

So, this steed pretty much fills the bill in terms of the man I want them to consider me ta be

Nobody knows I’m a produce product manager when I’m out ridin that lonely freeway

There’s no way to tell this baby gets corralled at a rundown apartment complex every night

The little girl at the drive through always smiles up at me real nice

Me and some buddies got a spot in the BLM land where there’s a lot of mud we can drive in

I love to soap her up, rinse her down and dry her off so clean and smooth and bright

I often lay in bed and fantasize about the accessories I’monna to buy her, real soon now

She really does about everything I need and pretty much sums it all up - for my life

Privately Punctuated Equilibrium

Punctuated equilibrium states that evolution proceeds in relative stability for long periods of time interspersed with much shorter periods during which many species become extinct and new species emerge

My brief and fragile peace is randomly shattered by an empty confusion filled with a brittle noise

The entropy of 1000 ads unwinds the cocoon I have spun to try to take on another form from within

Unbidden, implanted thoughts quickly separate me from meditative contemplation

Staccato power tools and snorting bulldozers thoroughly dissolve my peaceful illusion

This sense of inner calm morphs instantaneously into a raging and blind emotion – Over a parking spot

My clear sphere of equilibrium is punctuated by such random and very sharp sharp exclamation points

Jarred abruptly into pointless marketeers’ daydreams from eternal contemplation

Strong gusts of chaos churn my laminar Wa into choppy waves of turbulent tension

Unbidden facts thrust themselves upon me, piercing my most comforting curtain of self-delusion

Hoarse laughter, bright lights and loud engines trample me awake from peaceful dreams

Slick, dead-end merchandising schemes wrestle away my precious attention

Meaningless corporatized sports events quickly destroy my fragile focus

Bright colors and hypnotizing music morph me once again into a consumerist droid

Politicians smilingly coat my little wisdom with clouds of warm, quickly-evaporating pixie dust

A blind, teat-seeking greed is said to guide our progress, much to my confounded consternation

My inner peace evaporates from the light, heat and noise of our wondrous endeavors

This passive resistance of mine is as some hapless plant is to our progress-bearing earthmovers

Senseless morning cacophony twists a search for meaning into a suicidal longing for the void

In the furor of the sound and light my thoughts are changed as quickly as a chameleon’s colors

I fear the holy cause of our inalienable progress leads us all into this chaotic regression

So the next loud man on the airwaves all too easily punctures the shallowness of my self-deception

Simply Meeting Consumer Demand

Only because I demanded them, did they build obese, inefficient & overpriced road hogs

For my convenience, a thousand grimly cheerful, identical quick-stops dotted the land

To meet my needs, old malls were abandoned and new ones built on once-rich farmland

I craved fats, red meat & salt so they created triple bypass bacon cheeseburgers for me

I so loved my bluegrass that they spewed forth packaged pesticides and over-fertilization kits

They imported us cheap designer knockoffs so we could discard them without a thought

I feared fictional faraway enemies so much that they spent ever more, every year, on arms

We prospered to such a degree they created the gambling industry to occupy our free time

To meet my demand for thoughtless convenience they put everything in throwaway plastic

My wants guided them to fatten cattle in filthy feedlots on human-grade corn they could not digest

My attention to price forced them to slaughter and process animals using criminal factory methods

I would not pay a cent or lift a finger to recycle so they created and filled the Great Toxic Landfills

We could not do without legends so they pushed profitable but non-role model corpro-sports heroes

Our personal savior demanded that we evangelically spread democracy – with our divine Military

I needed my space so they built me a giant faux ranchette on 3 acres with a 500’ driveway

I wanted sex and she needed drugs and love, so he found a rewarding career as a slimy pimp

My childish need to make noise created your comical high performance pickup truck industry

We loved the first sequel so much you filmed parts II-IV simply for our movie-viewing pleasure

We grew up craving the pus-like white bread that you handled like automotive parts

Consumer demand alone powered a wondrous expansion of their poisonous fast food empires

Simple supply and demand alone drove up health care prices so very steeply year after year

The people called for more sports and entertainment and shouted down the real news

I demonstrated that my preference for cheap bad beer well-mated with slick & vapid advertising

It was we calling for the shuttering of our factories and demanding floods of shoddy overseas imports

Because of our consumer wants, brave entrepreneurs clear cut the last remaining old growth trees

To satisfy our oil demand, altruistic drilling firms opened up the remainder of our arctic wilderness

To bring us our trendy seafood they strip-mined the entire vast seas of every form of life

Anticipating our love of the new, they built things to last only a single product cycle

To make it easy for me to keep coming back they put everything in 238 billion plastic bags per year

The market’s clarion call for coal power meant that they need not restore their mining sites

Record demand for electricity forced them to desperately fight every single emissions reduction law

Our concern over product safety led to their illegitimate bankruptcy to avoid paying any reparations

My demand brought on drug cartels who killed 50000 Mexican citizens and even more of us

For we so loved our cellphones that our carriers charged us more than anywhere else in the world

They built jetskis, OHVs and snowmachines because that is what I really wanted in my wreckreation

The drive-thru mega-church appeared because I needed quality time alone with my personal savior

Taking An Ignorant Dominion Over The Earth

Quote any out-of-context scrap of your wornout religious fairytale that can grease your own agenda

Plunder this earth in the truly wacko belief it was created for your ignorant and selfish whims alone

Righteously waltz away from your messes with profit in your pocket and hand on the good book

Rest easy in the certain knowledge of your divine right to an eternal and shameless greed

Take dominion over the beasts and despoil all the places in which they might take their shelter

Hunt them down, burn them out, or even, vow to protect those few your children deem attractive

Treat plants and animals just the same: For personal & disposable use in any way you see fit

After all, they lack the everlasting souls with which your one true god has favored you, alone

Foul the air with impunity seeking extractive revenue or gas-powered wreckreation

Cut and burn the forests for corporate gain under his command to go forth and multiply

Concoct and release any manner of poisonous chemicals - if you think you can make a quick profit

Empty even the vast seas of all their life to satisfy the insatiable demands of the blessed free market

Sanctimoniously treat your brown-eyed cattle as mere non-living, statistical units of production

Modify their genetics at your whim, deny them the calming shelter of their herds,

Raise them in crowded filth, kill them without any dignity and just as cheaply as is possible

Rend and cleanly package them in bloody factories and then bulk ship them as consumer goods

Remain smug in the knowledge that you alone are cast in your one god’s image

Channel the rivers, strip their banks bare and introduce all manner of your toxic runoffs

Casually block out the divine skies with your smoke and His stars with your paranoid nightlights

Consume non-renewable resources at unsustainable rates behind casual, knowing smirks

Take accidental dominion over the atmosphere, obliviously unbalancing its exquisite constituents

Unconsciously but innocently infect and pock the earth that He bequeathed only to you

Derive moral authority from scripture and trust the outcome to the blind hand of free enterprise

Try vainly to place yourselves divinely outside of the earth’s cycles and its cosmic web of life

Put people and jobs above the natural world and its cycles without which they cannot even exist

Righteously commend the territories of the heathen enemy and his false god to ashes and to ruin

Matter-of-factly demand adequate income from any lands socialistically held in the national trust

Praise those who gash and extract for us and allow them to move on without healing the land

Swarm into any marginal habitat you stumble on and guiltlessly tip its balance towards entropy

Measure the health of your society simply by its consumer spending and unemployment rate

Always make sure to put people first in a ceaseless, artificial struggle to overcome nature

Be sure and erect sturdy fences to cut off access beyond your leveraged holdings

Blindly trust to the wisdom of billions of isolated, greedy decisions to result in a sustainable future

Blithely waste and pollute irreplaceable clean water on a daily basis without the slightest regret

Pray for relief from the drought and heat while steadfastly denying that our efforts produced them

Take it on faith that air, water and an equable climate are inexhaustible free goods, provided by god

Let the animals and the habitat which supports them and us all exist simply at your pleasure

Ignore the finite nature of all the resources squandered in raising your precious children

Permanently alter ancient rain forests with a single-minded focus on the profit for this fiscal period

Rest secure in the perfection of heaven, independent of any god-willed mess on this earth

Take dominion over the forests and plant millions of cloned trees, equally spaced and fenced-in

Artificially color the modified fish that you unsustainably farm while poisoning the ocean

Thank god for his blessings then stuff down too much and just throw away the rest

Draw freely from earth’s finite resources provided for you alone in his infinite wisdom

Trust that he will look after tomorrow thus allowing you to blindly consume and despoil today

Sleep well believing that you follow the only true and righteous path to eternal salvation

Trample the silent lilies of the field in a smoky and noisy quest for your vital wreckreational pleasure

Celebrate our fruitfulness under his edict even as we render our very nest unfit for life

Take up arms for god and lay waste to the enemy lands in His name and for His glory

Twist and eviscerate your god’s teachings such that you evade responsibility for the earth that nurtures you

Teach that preserving this lonely planet is criminally negligent in terms of family costs in jobs and money

Dwell on important moral concerns like abortion, gay marriage and flag-burning while ignoring the vast ecological holocaust of our foolish lifestyles

Mindlessly shovel resources into that blind and gaping maw of global corporatism

Trust that things will turn out all right according to His mysterious and omniscient plan

Call the heat and drought and new deserts the unfathomable will of your omnipotent god

Respond grudgingly with tiny band-aids as entire ecosystems collapse but unquestioningly increase already unconscionably huge military outlays

Try and save the species of your choice, if you will, though they have nowhere to live or anything to eat

Marvel at the wonder of His creation over the roaring of the bulldozers in the background

Displace the plant and animal communities with filthy, teeming, unplanned slums

Rip up fertile sustaining farmland for shoddy strip malls selling throwaway plastic schlock

Destroy ecosystem linchpins but still, find your solace in prayer as the mystery of His ways unfolds

Twist a fossilized religion and out-of-context economic theory into a rationalization for unencumbered, shortsighted & suicidal greed

Give thanks for all of our blessings and righteously ignore their toxic origins and externalized costs

View all of his creations through the unique lens of our own divine entitlement

Take dominion, secure in the knowledge that His will be done, in the fullness of eternity

Building a better tomorrow via our ordained pursuit of individual happiness

Fighting environmental legislation that may restrict freedom and could drive up costs

Building flimsy firetrap strip malls along every new stretch of overpriced highway

Investing in security to the tune of ½ a trillion dollars per year with built-in increases

Draining unproductive wetlands and not missing the clean water, birds and fish a bit

Fighting for your right to a 5 ton behemoth to drive 50 miles every day to your shit job

Cutting costs to consumers by shifting expensive development, production and pollution overseas

Collecting rich memories staring waxy-eyed at your home entertainment center from the couch

Sharing quality family meal time with artificial fast food or at some corporate franchise restaurant

Going it alone, thinking we’re in the lead, while everyone else actually heads the other way

Allowing all forms of excessive noise as if it were some kind of a god-given constitutional right

Letting teenaged children of unwed grandmothers have even more kids be born on welfare

Encouraging all forms of vapid credit consumption all for the sake of our blessed GDP

Eliminating guilt through absolute trust in decisions made all alone with our personal savior

Vilifying the opposition and reducing all issues to incontrovertible black and white soundbites

Building a better tomorrow planning ahead nearly one whole business quarter at a time

Meeting shareholder stock price responsibilities via layoffs, benefit cuts, mergers and outsourcing

Advancing global society via our negative saving rate lifestyles and their 14 hour work days

Rolling out a glossy advertising campaign instead of developing new and better products

Subsidizing corporate agriculture while forcing bogus free trade deals upon smaller economies

Finishing off the remaining old growth which eliminates both logging and tourist jobs - at once

Creating artificial confusion over climate change in a shared corporate-governmental strategy

Raising prices on disappearing fish to encourage supply so that every last one will be caught

Tainting food with un-inspected foreign ingredients and then proudly selling it as Packaged in USA

Simply ignoring the steady decay of our roads, bridges, water systems, electrical grid and internet

Outlaying far more for prison warehousing than fostering childhood development

Spending social security as collected instead of investing it for later recipients

Researching erectile dysfunction and botox instead of superbugs, malaria and pandemic flu

Bravely rebuilding in the middle of flood zones in gross denial of costs and common sense

Erecting a giant fence by Mexico while Europe adopts a single currency and border

Increasing our foreign technological dependence just as our domestic ignorance proudly swells

Touting a free market based health care system that both overprices and under-serves

Institutionalizing a two-party system grown shamefully paralyzed by divisive partisanship

Fostering a devotion to corporate sport devoid of anything but a greed-filled profit motive

Passing 10000 page omnibus spending bills where everyone gets a piece of pork

Dumbing down their tests, inflating their grades and calling them tomorrow’s world leaders

Excusing vast social and environmental destruction by cynically mouthing ‘You cant stop progress’

It’s Only A Con Game, Corporate Sports Suckers

Your punk check ain’t gonna change one cent no matter which way the game goes

The big boys are playin you like suckers just to take your meager chump change

You’re a fool to get all worked up over muscular black men dressed up in tights

This is the pabulum they feed you to keep your mind empty and your mouth shut

But you’d watch that shit in the ICU first thing after your abused heart gave out

Your heroes waste their money and get arrested for rape and dope and assault

You know more about their phony sports statistics than your own credit card debt

That childish hero worship ain’t ever gonna get you a share of their title money

Yelling and eating and drinking by the big screen don’t enrich your future one damn bit

Win or lose you will still have to make the payments on that upside down car loan

You ain’t on the team and none of them would even give a rip about yer dumb ass

Wake up and smell the Astroturf and then go scrape that decal off your car

It’s not loyal and patriotic or an honored part of some bogus traditional family heritage

But the advertisers and sponsors play it up like it must be a big part of real life

Get the stupid theme music out of your one-track, beer-soaked brain

Stop watching and talking and dreaming and thinking about it so much all the time

You waste so many hours every week on the Big Game, you might just as well have been asleep

Then you have this foolish gnawing emptiness when its over again for another year

Maybe you can have their copyrighted logo incised on your financed headstone

Perhaps your idea of heaven is a box seat as your team wins the big one every day

And you let the clever advertisers keep on beating their sad empty shit into your empty skull

While you just sit there getting fatter and your heart and eyes and brain wear out

You will never even ask why sports is reported as much as news on every stupid channel

But its really not just a game, is it? Pathetically it is a very important part of your tiny life

You get your thrills through them, and you jump up and wave your fist and shout

You’re a loyal fan who knows all their names, even though they never win a game

With all the time, thought and emotion you have invested, you should be very rich

It's only a game...It’s not only a game, it’s your holy quest, you toadlike little weenie roaster

They’re making millions and your real income is going down even as you sit there

You just charged 5 Gs at 20% interest so you could see the game on a big screen TV

You just can’t separate the artificially flavored hype from the unvarnished, tawdry reality

The noise, color and violence touches a very basic juvenile need deep inside of you

And they play upon it to prey upon you and help you retain a retarded immaturity

Put down the sports news, get off that website and stop dissecting their performance

or just maybe you can take that sexy fantasy with you as you leave your debts behind and die

Greedily Pimping The Holidays

Every year, stoking your guilt with their latest phony hot items and newest big sellers

Another month and, What do you know? Yet another Merchant’s Holiday has arrived

They’ve got jingles and decorations, gifts and zesty-sweet, factory-produced treats

For they must perpetually increase an artificial demand simply to stay in business

They have special offers, items on sale, deep discounts and great promotions

They try to pump you full of shame and guilt should you dare not to spend

You can still buy on credit - even if there is no income behind your card

Your very humanity can be defined by simply following their purchasing cycles

$XMAS, birthdays, anniversaries, valentine’s day and others which come and go

Beautiful people in expensive advertisements meant to part you from your cash

Since you love them, For the family, Just for her, Thinking of you – And buying too much

Assuaging your guilt, buying their love & pretending to maintain Traditional Family values®

Co-opting christianity, playing on emotions and performing a greedy mass hypnosis

It’s on sale, Don’t you love them, Time’s running out. Are you some cold, cheap loser?

Halloween, thanksgiving, easter and Mother’s Day all beckon with their own tailored ads

The advertising pimps purify and hyperbolize them and parade them in front of your noses

For mother, Don’t forget Dad!, Because they love you. Buy now or forget the Happily-Ever-After

Buy this to avoid some unspoken punishment of guilt and loss of humanity

We were late again with the rent since it was little Timmy’s birthday this month

The kids are dosed with our ads and screaming for it - Won’t you make them happy?

Show her that you still love her by taking on a few more years of easy, over-budget payments

You can feel good about your debt because you didn’t buy any of this for yourself

The Chinese slave factories are being geared up for the anticipated phony holiday demand

And after every holiday the garbage truck takes away unused things that you could not afford

Perversely enough, Buyer’s Satisfaction lasts something like maybe almost 10 minutes

And then that gnawing emptiness returns and you must quickly focus on something else

You know you don’t really need it and you can’t afford it, But It’s ‘Christmas’

You struggle with your current car payments as you salivate over their latest models

Their survival and your jobs are tightly bound to leveraged over-consumption

Desperately they flog you with their absurdly creative and expensive fantasies

Their stock prices and bonuses dependent on increases in year over year sales

Locked in a deadly embrace, we dance blindly together towards an unnecessary credit abyss

They’re pumping tired Christmas carols down your throat for 2 months every year

You must buy big for birthdays and anniversaries or you are forgoing human relationships

Get with the program or face the fact that you’re an inhuman scrooge heading to hell

And don’t you dare coldly dwell on the fact it’s all invented by marketeers for salesmen & CEOs

If You Haven’t, You Can’t Know

If you have not awakened to the sound of a creek burbling beside you

Where do you get the gall to vote against cleaning up our lakes and rivers

If you haven’t squeezed the throttle and heard the hoarse bellow and felt its raw power

You’ll never understand why OHVs are just the most fucking fun

If you never saw the earliest morning sun kiss a wild mountain basin

You can’t ever get a clue as to why wilderness might just be important

If you haven’t had one of your platoon buddies get his legs blown off right there beside you

You’ll not understand the great camaraderie even in a pointless and immoral modern war

If you never robbed a frightened white man at gunpoint when in need of a fix

You don’t understand what shaking with drug-enhanced psycho excitement is all about

If don’t know the rapture with which our savior fills our hearts

Your eyes are simply closed and your soul is truly dark and empty

If you have never gotten all shook up over the smell of meth abrewin’

You cant criticize the beutifool buzz that rots our teeth and makes our hair fall out

If you haven’t ever lost more than you could afford but just kept on playing anyways

You will never know how good it feels to win back even just a little bit

If you never stated proudly you were eager for the chance to clear your name

You cannot know why you then claim to have no comment regarding the allegations

If you never became quite still and simply regarded all of your wandering thoughts

You can derisively dismiss that phony bullshit about the sound of one hand clapping

If you haven’t nearly died and then realized you are looking at a peaceful sunset

It’s hard to know just how miraculous each and every second of our lives really is

If you should ever notice yourself dwelling on some phony sport or another

The door to your cure has begun to swing open in front of you at last

If you haven’t quite grasped the lure that drives men to unmuffle their vehicles

You really need to get right up here behind the wheel in this big bad baby

If you haven’t ever sweat too much and breathed too hard

You will not truly appreciate the gentle sun of a desert Winter

If you only ever eat vegetables, fruit and all that other so-called organic shit

You cannot understand the addictive joy of salt, sugar and hydrogenated oils

If you just read the bible and watch what’s new on TV

You’ll miss the wisdom of Mohammed and his buddy Isaac Newton

If you never spent too many lonely nights in the dark, all alone

You cannot fully appreciate the peace of slumbering together

If you’re always in an angry hurry because it’s still late once again

It really won’t be too easy to just sit there and listen to those stupid birds

If you’ve only weighed their arguments and critiqued other’s decisions

It’ll be hard for you to understand undertaking any real action of your own

If you never questioned the endless mowing, watering, fertilizing & pesticiding of your lawn

You probably never walked barefoot in some quiet forest meadow

If you really have thought through what you are saying right now

You won’t need to be told to just shut the fuck up, once again

If you haven’t hiked hard up to an alpine ridge on a clear september morning

You don’t deserve the gas it takes to drive your SUV over the pass, ever again

If you haven’t even saved a penny and lived large off of your maxed-out credit cards

Don’t bother to complain to me about those evil those Tax and Spenders

If you can’t even do the four operations of basic arithmetic in your head

Don’t you dare and try to question a scientist’s so-called fuzzy math

If you haven’t ever swam in a warm ocean during a real rain

You likely worry way too much about getting a little wet

If you can’t conceive of any society not based upon simple greedy profit motives

Sustainability surely sounds like another cockamemie liberal fairytale to you

If you never were in awe of the interwoven cycles of the web of this earth

You’ll find it easier to believe that we alone are possessed of a soul

If you still believe a god who awaits you created all of this and left behind his word

You need never even look into the void yet for even the briefest single moment

If you hadn’t seen those kids grow up and loved them so much through thick and thin

You cannot understand their exceptional nature or the uniqueness of their gifts

If you felt you always needed to stop in order to smell the roses

You were lucky, because you never noticed you really were not going anywhere...at all

Our Doomed Corpro-Conservative Way Forward

Do not design new products or organize production, just send the half-baked specs overseas

Let laid off workers patiently await the good jobs you said their layoffs would help create

Walk away from your pension and benefit obligations to go build plants in southern china

Employ uprooted peasants for a dollar a day and trumpet this as the great New World Order

Give up the croplands to the stewardship of subsidized corporate conglomerates

Keep them working 14 hours a day to send a little money back to starving families

Close up those new Mexican maquiladoras because their wages are getting just too high

Call poverty the price of inexorable progress and preach solemnly of Personal Responsibility

Import autos and oil while clumsily trying to export an inequality-based evangelical democracy

Keep chanting the tired fairytale about free trade creating a better world for us all

Have neither business nor government pensions and no savings or jobs for those laid-off at 50

Ignore the collapsing house of credit cards that will eventually leave 99% in equal poverty

Trumpet our vaporous financial genius, infantile marketing wizardry and overpriced sales expertise

‘Invest’ trillions in deficits on defense against the phantasmal enemies who surround us

Profit on higher education by ensuring that it only comes with a heavy burden of debt

Send them back scrap metal and used paper in exchange for plasma TVs and game consoles

Place your implanted consumerist needs above the once-good earth that sustains them all

Pretend foreigners will rely on our overspending to sustain their loaning us even more, forever

Marvel at our consumer’s ingenuity in behaving as if their negative savings rates are sustaiable

Call for less government interference while lobbying for tax breaks, subsidies and tariffs

Pretend that multi-million dollar bonuses for cynical bankers and brokers are just and well-deserved

Dispose of workers at 50 but let them try to live til 80 without work, savings or healthcare

Give the Asian billions a little taste of the good life just as the natural resources run out

For god’s sake have them keep their children away from the poisoned rivers and acid lakes

Recite a scripted homily that decent health care is simply another profit-driven industry

Sneeringly, get governments out of the ‘business’ of species and habitat preservation

Pour billions into violently securing oil supplies and next to nothing on its replacement

Clone vast and toxic exurbs with economies based solely upon shopping and services

Cleverly design products which break just as their replacements are coming to market

Headquarter in Bermuda, produce in China, support in India but advertise as All-American

Create ads with soft music, omissions and misrepresentations spoken in soothing tones

Convince them that simply rewarding your blind greed will surely lead us all to a better tomorrow

Contract food ingredients from the lowest overseas bidder with no on-site oversight or inspections

Polish a reputation for iron control but, at your trial, claim you never knew of any crimes

Act eager to clear your name but let your greasy, expensive lawyer do all the talking

Scurry from the spotlight behind toadying spokesmen you deliberately keep in ignorance

Cynically foster a bitter political stalemate that lets your criminal neglect continue to run its course

Then duck into waiting limos without a comment, O ye brave knights of unbridled capitalism