American Porn by Heathcote Williams Read online

  AMERICAN PORN

  Heathcote Williams

  Image © Gee Vaucher

  ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.’

  — Antonio Gramsci

  Smashwords edition

  Thin Man Press 2017

  Copyright © Heathcote Williams

  The right of Heathcote Williams to be identified as the Author of the Work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

  without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Contents

  The United States of Porn

  Health Warning

  Trump versus Clinton

  President Donald J. Trump

  The White House Fly

  Hollywoodland

  Snuff Films at the White House

  Mr President

  The President of the United States Is Really a Tree

  Happy Thanksgiving!

  America: How it Works

  The Atomic Museum

  Septimus Severus

  The Dying Bee

  Name a Radical Film

  The Lion and the Lamb

  The President of the United States is Weeping

  The Dalai Lama, ISIS and America

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgments to Susan de Muth, John Lahr, Elena Caldera, Colin Gibson, Eddie Mizzi, Rex Pyke, Dave Motion, Lily Williams, Nigel Allen, Graham Yates, Jon Kunac-Tabinor, Carrie Giunta, Paula Finch, Robin Beste, Martin Wilkinson, Simon Drake and Mike Figgis.

  Three of these poems were first published in a limited edition of 36 copies by Gerard Bellaart of Cold Turkey Press. A reading by the author of The United States of Porn, recorded by Jan Herman, was released by Sea Urchin Editions in 2013.

  ©Elena Caldera

  The United States of Porn

  Amerigo Vespucci, of Florence,

  A peddler of pornography,

  Gave his name to America.

  When Martin Waldseemuller,

  A sixteenth-century map-maker,

  Was looking for a suitable name

  For a particular land mass to the West,

  Thought to hold a shortcut —

  The fabled North West Passage to India —

  Long sought after by navigators who hoped

  That it might spare them circumventing the Cape

  On that continent’s treacherous, southernmost tip.

  Waldseemuller thought at first of calling it the North Indies

  (In line with the West Indies and the East Indies),

  Until the name of Amerigo Vespucci entered his mind.

  Amerigo, a senior steward of Lorenzo de Medici,

  Had travelled both to Guinea and to Brazil

  And written accounts of his adventures

  In which he revealed that, after living with Amazon Indians

  For all of two weeks, he had discovered

  That his hosts in the rain forest were naked.

  This of course was appropriate on their part —

  Their being nearer the equator than Florence —

  However, Amerigo, their beady-eyed guest, foresaw a market

  In the drawing-rooms of Italy for some prurient tales

  In which he'd detail their customs and invent some more.

  With a tabloid glee he’d make out the Indians to be outlandish —

  They frolicked in the sun, had carefree orgies; and fecklessly killed

  Unwanted children, on whom, Amerigo would insist, they snacked.

  In these fables, the indigenous people were erotomaniac cannibals.

  His readers lapped up his exploitational gallimaufry

  Set in a paradise untrammelled by Church or State

  And his salacious tales became an Italian bestseller.

  Even though Amerigo was never in fact to set foot upon it,

  Waldseemuller gave what would become ‘America’ his name.

  It was just business: Waldseemuller was spicing up his maps

  By capitalizing on the notoriety of Amerigo’s accounts.

  Thus America, along with its dream, was named after a porn writer

  Who worked for the Medici, the mafia of the Middle Ages.

  ‘In my beginning is my end,’ wrote Eliot in The Four Quartets

  And now Amerigo’s bankrupt landmass survives on pornography

  And on the profits from the sale of its instruments of killing.

  Chatsworth, California, is the HQ of America’s Pornocracy

  Where the vulnerable are herded by the voracious

  Into the maws of a multi-trillion-dollar industry.

  An industry strewn with suicides who’ve lost their identity

  To repetitive humping in exchange for money and for drugs

  In a forlornly unfulfilled wasteland frantic for a hole to fill.

  A new porn video is produced every thirty minutes in the USA

  Where ninety-seven percent of all pornographic web pages

  Are generated for a global food chain of interlinked Personal Computers.

  Phillip Toledano, Photographs of men watching online pornography, taken on January 25, 2011, New York: New York Review

  When Adolf Hitler was preparing to invade Poland,

  The sinister, lip-smacking troll, Doctor Goebbels,

  Hobbled beside him, straight out of a Wagner opera.

  Goebbels was an expert on how to debilitate opponents

  And, in the case of Poland, he’d make pornography a weapon

  Targeting Polish officers in an erotic PsyWar.

  They were infiltrated with pornography by the Nazis

  As a matter of state policy… for Goebbels thought

  That if they possessed it, they’d put up less of a fight.

  Goebbels believed pornography worked as an anaesthetic —

  His enemies, ironically, could be softened by being stiffened —

  And his opponents could be maddened by graphic portrayals

  Of their wives, at home, in the Polish officer husbands’ absence…

  Doctor Goebbels knew his Freud and his Bernays and his Adler

  And how psychosexual mechanisms worked.

  Still more is known now through hooking up lab rats

  To electrodes that stimulate the pleasure centre of the brain;

  If they’re placed in a cage with two buttons to press,

  One dispensing food, the other dispensing orgasms,

  Typically, the rats will soon starve themselves to death

  If they haven’t already died from exhaustion.

  Goebbels knew sexual stimulation to be a powerful method

  Of social control and that’s why its manipulations are still rated,

  Given its soporific effect on consumerism’s lab rats —

  Particularly handy in a pre-revolutionary situation

  Where levels of inequality exist such as never seen before.

  Pornography is capitalism's reward for political apathy.

  Pornography is the sensual soma of Brave New World

  The insidious tranquillizer that neuters collective action

  So that, in the US, few are angered by just fifty people

  Having more wealth than half of the entire American population,

  And few are provoked by another hundred and fifty new billionaires

  Joining the American billionaire club every year,

  While twenty million people die from hunger and disease />
  And while the average billionaire annually spends twenty-five million dollars on food, entertainment, then more food and entertainment,

  Enough to feed seventy thousand hungry people for a year.

  Imperial Rome spent fifteen percent of its tax revenue on its war machine,

  The imperial USA spends fifty-four percent of its tax revenue on its war machine.

  Or rather on Defence Contractors — the body guards of an elite —

  Because the more money that corporate America hoards,

  The more weapons it needs to protect itself…

  To protect itself from the consequences of its own actions.

  Amerigo’s country is founded on the genocide of its First Nations

  And sustained by genocide in countries all over the world.

  Amerigo’s country has sponsored serial holocausts

  In Central and South East Asia, and the Middle East,

  All with the same motive: capturing another country’s resources.

  Forty-six percent of children who lose an arm or leg in the world,

  Lose it to a weapon manufactured by an American company.

  The US government receives $2,650 billion in taxes each year,

  Of which fifty-four percent goes towards war and destruction.

  ‘We are bankers. You are nothing, and when our greed

  Gets the better of us, you must help us out.’

  The sex toy industry is valued at $15 billion;

  It’s enough to provide for the healthcare needs of all women

  In impoverished countries. But, ‘We are American bankers,

  ‘We invest in sex toys. They have a high yield. You are nothing.

  ‘We are American bankers. We are happiest if we’re making money;

  ‘Making money by people pleasuring themselves with machines.’

  As befits a country named after the Medici mafia’s gopher,

  America spends more money on weapons each year

  Than the whole world spends on food and drinks.

  In 1998, Lockheed Martin refused to give free prosthetic limbs

  To children maimed by its weapons.

  ‘We are American bankers. We invest in weapons. You are nothing.

  ‘We are citizens of the United States of Porn.

  ‘We live in an armed Imperialist pornocracy.

  ‘We are kleptomaniac bankers, you are nothing.’

  ‘A few thousand miles of cannibal land’ was how Robert Korner,

  CIA Adviser to John F Kennedy, described resource-rich West Papua Before the invasion to the benefit of the US Mining company Freeport.

  The same allegations of cannibalism as Amerigo Vespucci once made

  Allowed the Papuans to be slaughtered by the American empire –

  To be treated as unpeople and therefore ripe for exploitation…

  Whilst back in the USA, in the cradle of another civilization,

  Porn barons bewitch tame porn tribes to act out primitive rituals:

  Smeared with baby oil and wearing rubber sheathes, they eat each other.

  There are twenty-two million women in the world who spend five hours a day

  Collecting water for their children and families.

  During the financial crisis there were American bankers

  In Wall Street who watched porn for up to five hours a day.

  But a marriage between such unfeeling profiteers from poverty

  And porn addicts is an ideal marriage since both are bankers

  And porn addicts distort the way you love your fellow man.

  ‘We are bankers, we crunch numbers. You are nothing,

  ‘We are bankers, you are nothing. Pass the Kleenex.’

  Bigger than Hollywood, porn pump-starts the US economy —

  The cream-filling in its military-industrial sandwich

  Upon which the rest of the world is now force-fed.

  Every second in Amerigo-Vespucci-land thousands of dollars

  Are spent on porn by two hundred and fifty million citizens

  Who look away from their porn screens

  And wave wet tissues at their Statue of Liberty

  Then smile, slack-jawed, ‘Look Mom, look at what we can do.’

  Then it’s back to the screen: porn screens in the White House;

  Porn screens in the Pentagon; porn screens in the Supreme Court;

  Porn screens in the Senate offices; porn screens in Congress.

  Two hundred and fifty million militarized masturbators

  Are enslaved by billionaire pornocrats relentlessly promoting

  Cybernetic snake-pits of squirming bodies, all gasping,

  ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’ ‘Ah!’

  While all are in denial: ‘I don’t like cocaine, I just like the smell of it’.

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with sexual belligerence, it’s harmless.

  ‘If people want to see people holding women down. So what?’

  Romantic arousal is now mediated by favourite porn clips;

  One addict confessed to logging on to three hundred vaginas

  Before getting up in the morning — indicative of synaptic change.

  ‘What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death,’

  Said Susan Sontag, and she was echoed by J G Ballard:

  ‘A widespread taste for pornography means that nature

  ‘Is alerting us to some threat of extinction.’

  ‘When liberty comes,’ said Wilde, ‘with hands dabbled in blood

  ‘It is hard to shake hands with her.’ Equally hard to shake hands

  With those panting and throbbing due to repetitive stress disorder

  Induced by Miss Porn USA and her all-enveloping porn cloud that Governs global weather, despite pornography being as dull as golf.

  In the caves of Lascaux, prehistoric man drew penises on stick figures

  But they may not have rooted him to the spot while he pleasured himself

  For instead he’d leave the darkness of the cave to pursue his own history –

  Being sensible enough to know that compulsively playing with himself -

  Preying on his own energy and milking himself for hours on end

  While watching flickering images - might make him prone to predators.

  Amerigo Vespucci, of Florence, a peddler of pornography,

  Set his seal on America: trillions in debt; its economy sexualized;

  Stealing others’ resources at gunpoint, and unable to feed itself.

  ‘They are living like parasites off the global economy,’

  Vladimir Putin said of America, which now only lacks

  William S. Burroughsi,

  Former pest control expert, to describe her final death-orgasm.

  Health Warning

  Health warning:

  Saturation Coverage

  Of the US Election

  Can cause brain damage.

  For nine months

  US Supremacism

  Indulges itself

  In an election

  For the US President.

  Somehow or other

  This always involves

  The US electorate

  Watching candidates

  Spending billions

  On trying to persuade it

  To elect murderers.

  Only the religious slaves

  Of a militarized state

  Will be elected.

  No applications

  From pacifists or humanists

  Will be entertained.

  Four million homeless

  Have no representative.

  It’s mass murderers

  Who are elected

  To rule the richest country

  In the entire world.

  Support for this farce

  Comes from people believing

  That America

  Sets an example

  T
o the world’s democracies

  And should therefore have

  Mass media coverage

  Non-stop, twenty-four seven…

  It’s relentless.

  Male or female; black or white

  It will be a mass murderer

  Who is elected.

  The moral high ground

  Is laid claim to by the world’s policeman

  As the mass-murdering begins.

  In the US election,

  A corporate dictatorship promotes