Sweet Jesus, I Hate America

And so would Jesus. So you'd better hope the Jews are right and that Jesus isn't coming back or 350,000,000 of us will have some fast 'splainin' to do on Judgment Day.

When I look around me, at this once-great nation, I think of Ambrose Bierce's definition of "resident": Unable to leave. The same could apply to most citizens whose economic legs have been broken and banking bastinado has hobbled us from leaving this sinking ship, this burning blimp of a country. And I'd leave it in a New York minute if I could.

Once I make my first million dollars, I'm going to buy a pub in the Irish countryside and look out the window to the green rolling hills while listening to drunks sing until the wee hours. Or maybe I'll buy a mansion in Manila and hire a Filipino houseboy like Jack London and maybe he'll call me, as did London's, "Mr. God." Or perhaps I'll move to France just to piss off the Republicans and eat pom frites until my arteries get harder and more brittle than crack pipes while thinking of Freedom Fries. At least I'll have one of the best health care systems in the world to care for me.

Virtually anything, sweet blue-eyed Jesus, anything would be better than what we have going on here. And why do I hate you idiots so much? Gee, let me count the motherfucking ways:

We live in a country in which super twinks like Justin Bieber and Youtube's Shane Dawson have sucked up 90% of the interest on the internet, in which it's virtually guaranteed that at any time of the day or night, the top trending topic on Yahoo or Twitter will be celebrity-related. This is because we care more about who Tiger Woods is fucking than who Goldman Sachs or BP or our own government is rear-ending.

We live in a country where huge segments of the population still believe that Saddam had WMDs, that we still belong in Iraq and Afghanistan, that America was founded on Christian principles yet still can't enumerate the five basic freedoms granted us by the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. A large segment of conservatives actually believe that Barack Obama is the anti-Christ and almost half of us, despite the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, still support offshore oil drilling. A huge state like California thought it was more important to deny same sex couples the right to marry than to tackle the state's huge budgetary shortfall or to address the looming water crisis.

We live in a country in which we had somehow miraculously transitioned from barbarism to decadence without the usual interregnum of civilization. We don't have civilization and never had. We've invaded more nations just in my own lifetime than Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Japan had combined. Our intelligence community and our "liberal" administration targets American citizens and others for assassination without due process. Our tax dollars pay for this and other war crimes yet we're eerily OK with this.

And it only stands to reason that such a materialistic, imperialistic nation wouldn't have a culture of its own. Culture? Make me laugh. We don't have culture, we have a hyperactive consumerism. Men and women of actual talent, people who had been able to raise themselves from the muck and mire of our pathetic public school system to write books of their own get ignored every day or dismissed with form rejection letters while air-headed douchebags like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber get body-tackled by celebrity-chasing literary agents and signed to $7,000,000 deals for books they don't and can't even write. Then they sign them to more and put them on TV more often than the test patterns that are more informative. Who cares that they're ghost-written by partisan hacks and racists and are more filled with lies than the Bible that tens of millions of us take literally? Talent alone is no longer even on an agent's or editor's list of priorities. The short list of priorities consists of one word: Sales.

We live in a nation in which our children have committed to memory every song lyric by Slipknot or Metallica but can't recall a single line by any of the Romantic poets and perhaps even Shakespeare. We prostrate ourselves before the red-carpeted altar of celebrity, willingly fleeced by the corporations that have created them without once realizing that we the unwashed masses would be tasered if we ever put one hand across that velvet rope.

Because we have been marginalized, criminalized and scrutinized by those with more money and property who loathe and fear us. And we're perfectly OK with that.

You make me sick, America, sick enough to puke up everything I've ever ingested since 1959. Never in my historical readings and in all my erudition have I ever seen a nation that wasted so much of its potential in such a relatively short span of time.

And yet you still cling like stubborn sin to the biennial belief that we wield fractional, momentary power every even-numbered year and that we actually elect officials who will represent us. Well, I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, comrades, but for every Alan Grayson and Dennis Kucinich there are approximately 433 other corporate zombies who have a less than representative agenda.

It used to be that Congress had outsourced its legislation to corporations such as the HMOs and the lending racket but actually it's the opposite that's true: It's the corporations who have outsourced their agenda to a Congress that plainly works for them. Think about how many millions of us have to sign petitions, make phone calls, send faxes, emails and letters just to get the begrudging attention of a Congressman. Think it takes a million Lloyd Blankfeins or Ken Lays to get that same congressman's attention? It takes only one because those are the individuals they represent, the individuals that the Supreme Court made of corporations.

We live in a nation in which a man can get years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family because, since Reagan, we'd found it easier and more expedient to criminalize and vilify poverty than to address the causes of it. But when the already-wealthy rig the gaming table that is Wall Street and cripple the housing market and tank the economy to make a few billion more, they get to negotiate with the SEC in climate-controlled rooms and no one ever talks about criminal charges let alone jail time.

Then when we were told by our "representatives" that we the people have to bail out these same corporations that helped cost us 8-12 million jobs and cause millions of foreclosures, instead of rising up in a quivering, blood-curdling fury on Pennsylvania Avenue or Wall Street, we merely change the channel and see if Britney Spears is wearing her underwear today. And it's up to the racist, post-literate Tea Baggers to do our protesting for us.

And we're OK with this, huh?

You fucking zombies don't deserve the democracy that your forefathers died to give you in Valley Forge, on the Lexington Bridge, in the streets of Boston. Why do I say that? Because nations, younger nations, nations who haven't had time to get spoiled by the illusion of freedom, nations like Iran, Kenya and Mexico rose up and openly rioted, and died, in the streets defending the democracy they knew had been stolen from them. We threw a few eggs at George W. Bush's limousine on January 20, 2001 and then went home and called it a good day's work.

God, I fucking loathe you and everything you don't stand for. Every time I hear Jimi Hendrix's rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock, Picasso's Guernica set to music, when the colors red, white and blue melted off the flag as in an acid trip and dribbled down the sewers of Main Street, every time I think of those Wah-wahed, tortured distortions it becomes clearer to me why he did it.

It was Jimi's mournful keen for an America he once knew, an America for which he would've fought as a paratroop in the 101st Screaming Eagles. It was Jimi's not very pretty obituary for an America to which we'd once aspired and had almost attained, a nation of such tremendous bounty, such potential for good.

Yet even as we drown in goods and are bombarded by services ranging from mortgage refinancing for homes we no longer own to lengthening our penises, we still produce less and less because all the jobs have been outsourced overseas. Despite supporting two losing and unwinnable wars, we have never had to sacrifice one teaspoon of sugar, candy bar or pair of nylons, have never once orchestrated one rubber, paper or scrap iron drive to support these war efforts. Almost 6000 families notwithstanding, We the People have sacrificed... nothing.

Well, I'm not OK with this. And while my emigration from this country will not change anything and few will care and none will remember, I think it's only important to enumerate my reasons for doing this if given the first available opportunity.

Our bought-and sold government is corrupt to the core, our sociopathic corporations are corrupt, our so-called culture is corrupted and talent, virtue and righteousness are punchlines.

First chance I get, I'm outta here in a New York minute, just me and my own, before I'm forced into a situation when, as H.L. Mencken visualized, I spit on my hands, raise the black flag and commence the slitting of throats.

America, America, America you perfumed and styling-gelled nation of pigs and sheep, I'm fucking through with you.