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Raking Lizards
for release 06-06-06
Washington D.C.
I think I am experiencing Current Events Burnout. Keeping up with the news is part of my job, but lately I have been forced to ask myself, "Can these idiots get any stupider?" So far the answer has been, "Yes."
For one thing, many people seem to think that building a fence or a wall is going to keep out illegal aliens. There is all this talk about 'securing our borders.' This has to remind me of the story about Joan Vollmer Burroughs. Joan was the amphetamine freak common-law wife of William S. Burroughs. She subsisted on benzedrine inhalers. They were living in Louisiana. Everybody else in the house were junkies, so when they were all in bed and the children were asleep and the dishes were washed and the floors were waxed, Joan would still be looking for something to do at three in the morning. There was a dead tree standing in the back yard. In this tree there were tree lizards. Joan would take a rake into the moonlight and rake the lizards out of the tree. She would rake them down and they would run back up the tree. This is the essence of the Sisyphus story. Ultimate futility. It also describes our efforts to 'secure the borders.' We are just Raking Lizards.
Then there is the "Protection of Marriage Amendment." There are many things that I don't understand in this world. I don't understand NASCAR for instance. Why would you want to pay to see that which you can observe on any freeway at rush hour? Is it just the paint jobs?
And I don't understand why we are wasting time even talking about gay marriage. Talk about fiddling while Rome is burning. There are actual problems out there. Brutal and unjust wars, an AIDS epidemic that is killing a million people per year, global warming, the rape of our economy by the oil companies, my lawn needs mowing. You know, real problems.
But instead trying to solve our real problems the government wastes three days on a doomed Constitutional amendment trying to decide who gets to fuck who. But that's the fundamental issue in all politics, isn't' it? Who Fucks Who?
The 'Protection of Marriage Amendment' is raking lizards too. Do the fools in the peanut gallery (fundie Christians) think that a Constitutional Amendment is going to stop homosexuality? I don't think so. No more than Prohibition cured drinking.
This brings me back to William Burroughs and Joan. Burroughs was a notorious homosexual. It is unclear whether the relationship he had with Joan was conjugal. They just liked each other and, you know, worked as a team. It had every earmark of a marriage. After all, he blew her brains out with a gun. Sounds like marriage to me.
But since Burroughs was a flaming queer, was this really a marriage between a man and a woman? It could be a deep Constitutional question. Or it could just be raking lizards.
America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.
--William S. Burroughs
