Short letter to the President. posted by Richard Seymour

What follows will be cheap and nasty, like sex with a Northern runaway.

Dear Bush,

Congratulations on winning this time around. Congratulations, too, on fooling the press into thinking your subsequent inauguration was a 'news' item, when everyone knew it was going to happen. Shutting down everything in a ten-block radius and spending $40 million must have contributed to the mystique (what did you initially pledge for the tsunami victims? No come on, dollars not pesos...).

However since I have your ear, (and what a divinely shaped Protestant ear it is), I'd liked to ask you if you really meant this:

All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you.

Because that is precisely the sort of thing drivel-merchants like Christopher Hitchens and Dennis Miller like to believe, and I can't believe that you are as idiotic as they strive to be. One awaits with sweet dread what kind of 'contrarian', anathematizing blimpism the Late Hitchens will generate next. Lean closer, please. You can wipe the phlegm off the lobe later. True, you aren't exactly ignoring the oppression of the Acehnese, but I would think that by trying to reinstate relations with the torturing, murdering, raping TNI was some kind of comfort to the oppressors. And when you assist the Colombian far right in its noble quest to wipe out peasants and trade unionists, I can't help but think you are again on the side of the - whatchamacallem? - evildoers. And when you prolong and amplify a long-standing US foreign policy tradition of unconditional support for Israel, it seems to me that you could be accused of standing with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and everything that has been entailed by that. There also appears to have been a minor putsch attempt in Venezuela which your comrades in the National Endowment for Democracy appear to have been involved in. You appear to enjoy more than convivial relations with the Saudi royal family, King Abdullah of Jordan, 'President for Life' Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and that gentleman with the mysterious name in Pakistan. Now, the unhappy workers of Pakistan are in open rebellion against their government, and have no apparent affiliation with the Islamists which populate your dreamscape. When will Bradley tanks rumble through Islamabad? I ask merely for information, and wouldn't dream of mocking someone with your obvious polemical talent ("er, er, its evil and bad and, er, er, God wants America to stand for freedom").

It's not that I think you're talking shit. It's just that you appear to be - well look, I don't want to be sesquipedalean, prolix or pleonastic - dissembling, issuing porcine whoopsies, dropping flam, bam and flim-flam, paltering, misciting, indulging in a petit-bourgeois deviation, coughing up testes, dissimulating, romanticising, mythologising and covinising.

I think we both understand one another.