Dear George,
You devil! You sneaky little devil! Two puffs of the sacred smoke and I suddenly understood the system and how you are gaming it.
There are no rulers, only people who think they rule. The truth is, George, you cannot control a truck plunging over a cliff into an abyss. The plunge is sheer momentum, the culmination of a haphazard string of errors, misunderstandings, miscalculations, and inattention. You are the driver, turning the wheel this way and that, flipping first the right turn signal and then the left, hitting the brakes and then the accelerator, all the while unaware of the truck’s plunge.
There is neither system nor scheme, but only a civilized clamoring at the trough to scarf as much pork as possible before the fall. Cash dollars are shipped to Iraq on pallets only to be lost; every push results in two shoves back. Wall Street is a snake devouring its own tail. Where once we spread jazz and cinema, we now spread death and destruction. Liberty has put down her torch that once welcomed the huddled masses and is busy building a wall to keep them out. (Both the Israelis and we learned our lessons well from the East Germans in Berlin.)
All the time you live your dreams of glory, seeing in every failure and fuckup an expression of God acting through you even though He has locked Himself in the bathroom and is going to stay there until our self-destruction is completed.
You are our teenage crown prince building a legacy of ruin while trying to talk to God through the bathroom door and mistaking His silence for direction. Those of us who are too stoned to give a shit salute you.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
6:00:12 AM 
|
|
