faux-slam by Jason Edwards
I know this girl named Anne. Her last name is Alice. And Ann Alice’s analysis of our present political situation is that there’s too much consternation over the alleged conflagration from the perturbation of right versus left, paciderm v. mule, old fart versus fool, shit versus stool, tool versus mess, the eight years of republican theft and our third year running now of what little hope we have, bereft of choice cause the freedom of choosing’s bruising anyone cruising to a school of thinking that if we’re all sinking it’s because the boat’s floating on the bloated corpses of corporation-floor killing. Miss Ann is no misanthrope, knows we no longer linger in an Eden of cooperation, a nation as guided by Kardashian flashing as the cash passing haphazardly and ever faster between slick-suited bastards richer for bitching at politicians itching to get re-elected at the cost of respect from the incorrect left. Miss Alice strokes her toes in the sand and understands better than any woman or man we stopped living in Wonderland in a time long long ago and so far far away you might as well say it was all a load of fiction from the start anyway. Ann Alice insists she doesn’t know much about politics except it’s full of Dicks and Chaneys chained to their rage and claiming we need to hate a man just because he loves another man, or hate a woman who’s a lesbian, or hate woman who’s forced to get an abortion, or a family that needs to go on welfare again, hate all of them, while at the same time it’s no crime for a corporation to drop a dime and steal a man’s pension, perfectly fine to ship his job to another land. Ann knows all of this. But that’s not the point, she says. You’re the point, she says. You point and you rail and say we need to raise hell but if there’s a devil in madness why do you all stay sane? Complacency’s not laziness it’s just a tight leash on craziness and you can make fun of the 99 sittin in streets slapping white-boy beats on drums paid for from sheets of sleeping with the enemy from new-born wail to age twenty three, but Alice told me she doesn’t see your op-ed pieces and your talk-radio pleadings doing anything except singing to choirs themselves made of liars carrying hymnals where every song’s the same: the other’s side’s to blame. Your masters are baiting you and creating pollution masked as solutions but there’s no execution in the excruciating sameness of every-day hollering at white collared bothering while retro kids eat collard greens cause it’s ironic and not because it’s the only thing. And don’t bother asking Ann Alice to ponder a preferred course of action, there’s no satisfaction in traction if the hill you end up climbing still sublime with the slime of just another set of elites replete with the sod of the defeated on their cleats, no matter what message they’re bleating. Short of retreating, Ann Alice’s analysis of the present political situation is that we’re shit out of luck, because we can either keep beating our feet on streets of stupidity, or just not give a fuck.