Boobie Lords of the Flies
(from Fernando Po, U.S.A., America's post-literate retreat to Plato's Cave)

They came of age concurrently
And all dodged Vietnam
Which helps explain why they fucked up
And got us in this jam
They didn't know what to avoid
And don't know how to scram

Their lack of war experience
Led them to overlook
The cruelty and ruin that
The likes of them mistook
For power possibilities
In their day-planner book

Since war had never touched their lives
Or troubled their careers
They had no understanding of
The first mate Starbuck's fears:
That those who do not fear a whale
Make bad boat-rowing peers

See, George and Dick and Bill and her
(whose name we will not speak)
All bought into an urban myth:
That anti-war is weak
Inflating a hot air balloon
That now can only leak

This damned deluded gang of four
Learned nothing from the past
They said we had to get right to
The future -- very fast!
Without a pause to sniff and smell
The noxious gas they passed!

Without a map to there from here
They set out to set straight
Their country's loss of "innocence"
With ignorance and hate
And wound up with some egg upon
Their face but not their plate

Bill bombed a Chinese embassy
Then had the cheek and gall
To get his feelings hurt when they
Would not return his call
(They felt their pain enough without
The need to hear him bawl)

George wanted so to have a go
At bad Saddam Hussein
Whom Bill had bombed for eight long years
Without a hint of gain
But which old Madam Albright thought
Was "worth" the grief and pain

But Dick and George -- co-presidents --
Had proved the theory true
That for the worth of less than one
We'd pay to have us two:
A pair of pompous pathogens
Who like a virus grew

George then got to act out his dream:
A chance to kick some ass
He pounded poor Saddam Hussein
But as it came to pass
Received a knock-out blow upon
His jaw of crystal glass

So now he staggers drunkenly
And bounces on the ropes
Advised and counseled by a troupe
Of inept crony dopes
With no choice but to eat his teeth
Along with all his hopes

He's turned so many corners that
He's circled his own block
To come again to where he's been
Like hands upon a clock
Without the least awareness since
His head's as hard as rock

And now they want to tell us that
We haven't any choice
The pundits have anointed her
The country's "new" Rolls Royce
Another lemon lottery
In which we've had no voice

It looks like all the grownups died
And left us to survive
To rediscover savagery
Like bees within the hive
Consumed and ruled by other kids
More brain-dead than alive

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2006