For you, Willie. God bless the Hell out of ya! Alright, so this is all the same thought and I’m just thinkering around with it some for y’all. And it’s all bullshit.
I bet some of y’all forgot this was in the offing. I didn’t, and it really is all one thought. It’s about more than lost weekends or divorce fodder, too. It’s about God and country, life, liberty, and the pursuit of revolution in the fast lane. Let’s hope no one gets hurt, because it’s not me in the fast lane. And you thought I was going to tell you something torrid, din’cha!? Wait–maybe I am!
A lot of the guys that started this country–the U.S.A., where I live–were church folk. They tried real hard, ya have to grant, but they were church folk after all, so they had blinders on just like lots of church folk always have, and still do today. Get to lookin’ too closely at the periphery of things and it’s scary, don’t we all know….
They came over here in the first place on the run from some other church folk, that wanted to kill the Hell out of them. So, naturally they immediately set about establishing a domicile, ( in someone else’s back yard, mind you), where they could kill the shit out of everyone else, instead. After a while that arrangement started to smell a little funny–on account of the bullshit, see–and a few got together to to try and straighten things out. Besides, the Grand Game wasn’t working out quite right and the game pieces kept getting scattered.
The Occupiers read St. Thomas’s Declaration at Acacia Park the other day, ( I call him St. Thomas just to mess with him–he was just as scrambled as the rest of us, if ya didn’t know). It was a beautiful thing. It was beautiful when Kyle read it with his shredded voice. It was beautiful when Jefferson wrote it, and beautiful when they read it in the Boston Common. It’s all the more applicable today if you crunch a few names and change a few numbers, and Jefferson would certainly be needing to restrain Patrick Henry from swinging blows by now if those guys lived now, and had let it all slide as far.
Jefferson wrote the Declaration, , but he had nothing to do with the Bill o’ Rights. He was out of town when they threw that stuff together, which they did ’cause they knew he hated the idea. In fact, he may have ditched town because he knew they were gonna just have to write it and he just couldn’t stand it. He figured it best to leave well enough alone, for fear of a thing developing like we’ve heard, “Everything not forbidden is mandatory.” Now would be the moment to mention that this is an axiom in–wait for it… Quantum Physics, stolen from literature fair and square by a fellow named Gell-Mann and named the “Totalitarian Principle”. That’s right–physicists see the poetry and the downright ridiculous humor in all this, too, sometimes.
The Bill o’ Rights contains stuff designed to keep government unobtrusive. No one could figure out a way to make it go away completely back in the day, but those guys had eaten enough shit to realize they didn’t want a buncha power to inhere in the Halls of Power. Even the church guys had had enough–my mom’s family came over to escape religious persecution real early on, (my aunt Leslie paid someone a boatload of money to tell her we came over with a boatload. Surely it’s not bullshit). So that’s what they were thinking about when they put together the addenda to the Constitution. How could Jefferson and the rest have guessed that it didn’t matter about the enumeration? We were bound to fuck it up, anyhow.
Willie, still onea my heroes, used to let his freak flag fly without regard for whom it may have snapped when the wind caught it. No doubt being out in the weather like that has worn his flag out some, so I hope I can spiff it up some for him–add some color, if you will. That weed-rag interview that set me off about all this was sad as a dirge, to me, simply ’cause I still idolize Mr. Nelson. I still hope he gets to be POTUS. If he does I wanna do some bongs in the Oval Office! But when I read his carryings on about medical marijuana, and how we ought to tax and regulate it and all that Republican, party-line shyte, I wanted to spend the rest of the week wearing a black arm-band, even though I know most of the”patients” at the weed stores here in Colorado just want to get stoned.
The decision to alter one’s consciousness, which each and every human being makes every single day as soon as the notion to open his eyes in the morning passes across the surface of his frontal lobes, is absolutely private, to be rendered with the final consultation of no one but the individual in question, and his or her God, (or absence of god, if such a thing were really possible). I promised I wouldn’t use that clunky English, but it’s important to be sure no one feels left out of this. Maybe I should say “his and her” now, to be sure I don’t miss any hermaphrodites, drag queens, or Chas Bono. The fact that this is a strictly spiritual decision relieves the government, and everyfuckin’body else of responsibility for my decisions, or anyone else’s decisions other than their very own. It also renders it illegal for them to regulate or tax. “Sin” tax, right? Ooooh– I can smell the smoke coming form y’alls ears from here, though I know not all those brain cells are heating up for the same reasons.
I promised to squeeze marriage into this, right? Still think I can’t do it? Watch this….
We have spent an awful lot of effort in this country worrying about whether or not queers ought to be allowed, allowed, to marry each other. Who is it gonna do the allowing? We the people? Aren’t we talking about the government? Isn’t marriage at its very most basic essence an spiritual agreement between some people and whatever god or non-god they deign to invoke? So what the fuck is a secular government doing in the marriage business at all??? If your church doesn’t like queers, don’t have any. If your church doesn’t like straights, get the pastor to put on lots of makeup and a Dolly Parton wig–that ought to scare them off well enough. But if those perverts in Washington start foisting their own crap on us then–oh, wait–they have, and the shit is totally screwed now!
St. Thomas said the government should do no more than to prevent folks from harming one another. (He got that idea from J.S. Mill, who likely got it by Divine Inspiration, if you ask me). So, a bit of tastefully rendered social contract law wouldn’t hurt, but licensing marriage is utterly unconstitutional, and maybe straight from the Devil, or the Balrog, or something. Just like prohibition laws of any stripe. You just can’t write one in stripes that are recognizably red, white, and blue. Maybe Willie’s flag is too faded for it to remind him of that, but I know the damn thing is still flying. I have to believe it. ‘Cause Willie’s a hero, an icon of the War from back before he was born.
And when we get together next summer we’re gonna laaaugh–’cause he gets it, ya know….
I lied about it bein’ part two, though. It’s all been the same story–all of it. I lied about the bullshit, too –it’s all fuckin’ True!!!
(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)