Death to the Bastards!

On the way home yesterday, Matt had his iPod plugged into some kind of cassette tape contraption that allowed him to play his music through the system in the car. Pretty good stuff. A group called Mischief Brew. One of the songs was titled “Nomads Revolt”. I was in the passenger seat, daydreaming while Matt drove us home from the Bronx. The music was raw but I liked it. It put me in the mind of days-gone-bye. I began to think about a time when I was concerned and ready to act upon that concern at the drop of a hat. That is what a lot of us were about in the 60’s. Ready to drop acid. Ready to question the proposition of war. Ready to drop acid, consider the war, and get up and ask the governor of the state of Florida, the Senators and the President what the hell they were going to do about the war…but that’s a whole other story.

I became lost in the music Matt had on the system and I let my thoughts run free as a dog. I let my feelings and my thoughts go and this is what I began to think.

I thought, “Why can’t we just hang a few of the bastards? The ones who are unaccountably collecting the rewards of the confusion of the economic catastrophe they themselves caused!” It has been forty years since I have felt like this, I thought, four decades of numbness. Four decades of sleep. I am rested and now I find I have a thirst for blood. I can picture them hanging from the lamp posts, up and down the boulevards of the island of Manhattan The bankers and underwriters and inventors of the instruments of deceit. I can see the citizens in the small towns-the workers from the local furniture factories on lunch break- with their pink slips in their pockets. A week away from collecting unemployment. Under the flag pole in the square in front of the county seat. The bodies of the mortgage brokers lined up on the grass, recently shot with light gauge 410’s. A slow, brutal, painful, educational death. I smiled to myself.

I smiled to myself when I thought what a few well placed, public executions could do for morale. A little blood in the right places might just turn the tide of thinking in the country. It worked for the French. It worked in Russia. By God, it worked here once and might it not be better than what lies ahead on the road? The road ahead for my children and their children as we descend into the careless stratification of our society?

Make no mistake, I am not a Republican

or a Conservative or an Anarchist.

I guess I am no longer a Democrat

or a Communist

or anything else

I can put a name to.

I am back in Washington DC

and it is Viet Nam all over again.

I am convinced

that there are self-serving forces afoot

who will bleed me dry.

Who don’t care if I die.

Who will take and take and take until I am dry

and blown away

if nothing comes up

and gets in their way

and I am thinking DEATH!!!