Big Bridge #10

An Open Letter to America

 

Bill Berkson

 

Dichotomy Times, Or How to Assuage Political Grieving
[Please note: this text is open to additions/deletions by others]

Break

Enter black space

Observe tops of trees, cornices, starry nights, traffic lights

Shrug and grunt like an Italian "under" Silvio Berlusconi

Trust to fine music

“Paint the town blue.” (Barrett Watten)

Tell jokes you never permitted anyone to tell before (laugh uproariously)

"The sound of a chainsaw is that of all the evil in the world having its way" (Anon. Welsh, 21st Century)

Never "reach out"

Exchange dictionaries

"Do not try to change the world, you will only make matters worse" (John Cage)

Think (or read up on) "Yippies"

Change not thyself

Be diagonal

Humbly reconsider The Perfectibility of Man* -- can such a notion be redeemed?

Fuck freedom
[Alternate: Fuck “the Freedom” – c.f. Christian Parenti**]


Bill Berkson
with thanks to Michael Rothenberg, Larry Sawyer, Barrett Watten, David Nash, Adam Gopnik, et alia




* “In 1939, [Auden] saw that what had happened was not an outbreak of barbarism but the consequence of modern ideas, particularly the idea that the world could be made perfect by eliminating imperfections (the Jews, the bourgeoisie).” – Adam Gopnik

**"Ah, the freedom. Look, we have the gas-line freedom, the looting freedom, the killing freedom, the rape freedom, the hash-smoking freedom. I don't know what to do with all this freedom. " —Akeel, a twenty-six-year-old Baghdad resident on life in the new Iraq, in Christian Parenti The Freedom.