Idlewild
You called me last night on the telephone
And I was glad to hear from you ’cause I was all alone
You said, “It’s snowing, it’s snowing! God, I hate this weather.”
Now I walk through blizzards just to get us back together
America is gone. It is not upon this earth. Soviet submarines plumb the United Pacifico-Americo-Atlantico Ocean and find nothing. Disney Corporation Overflight Satellites beam questions over the troposphere and hear answers from no one. The scattered children of the mother country cry for the nourishing milk of Culture, but their calls are heeded. Was America ever truly part of this world? It seems impossible that one land could hold such infinite variety, the land of the Breakfast Club and the Maltese Falcon, of Star Trek and Taxi Driver, of Camelot and Watergate. Maybe America was always as it is now: the land of dreams, memory, Culture-spawned illusions. But maybe not.
We met in the springtime at a rock-and-roll show
It was on the Bowery when it was time to go
We kissed on the subway in the middle of the night
I held your hand, you held mine, it was the best night of my life.
Paulie Walrus dies by inches. The thinkateer’s link to the collectivized consciousness has been sundered at the taproot, and now his ontological integrity fades. Soon he will cease to be a man unlike other men, and slide headlong into anonymity. If you ask him, he’ll tell you only one thing could save him: the rugged individualism made famous by American cinema and rock music. If you don’t ask him, his plum-colored velvet suit will fade, his gentle kindness will devolve into brusque passivity, and his teeth will rot.
‘Cause everyone’s your friend in New York City
And everything looks beautiful when you’re young and pretty
The streets are paved with diamonds and there’s just so much to see
But the best thing about New York City is you and me
The liche Orson Welles hungers. It used to be easy to find Culture to consume: it dripped from every vending machine and transistor radio. Culture pooled under studio apartments, grew wild in the streets and fed whole memetic ecosystems. It’s all gone now; only Orson remains. Orson is eternal and unchanging, forsoever long as they keep their filthy paws off his movie. Sometimes they mocked Orson, paraded him like an animal in front of their dismal cameras, begged him to hawk frozen foods and boxed wine. But now they are gone and Orson remains, and the core of Orson is a hunger only Culture can sate.
Statue of Liberty, Staten Island Ferry, Co-op City, Katz’s and Tiffany’s
Central Park, Brooklyn Bridge, The Empire State where Dylan lived
Coney Island and Times Square, Rockefeller Center
Wish I was there
The Fearon Group began life as a subsidiary of Disney Philippines, Ltd., but then foreign investors bought out the bad old man’s stock and began Phase Two. When you drink Starbucks you participate in an ongoing ritual praising Tixeon, the obfuscating god that hides under the skin of cities and belches cockroaches at night to feed its favored children. When you drink Pepsi you undergo a mystic communion with Tixeon the Closed Gate, whose sigil is the Bisected Circle. When you eat Burger King you eat the body of Tixeon incarnated as the Resurrected Bull-King.
You wrote me a letter just the other day
Said, “Springtime is coming soon so why don’t you come to stay.”
I packed my stuff, got on the bus, I can’t believe it’s true
I’m three days from New York City and I’m three days from you
Four of the Expanded, John, Josef, Yoko, and Leon walk the road of the world. There is only one road, really, a spider’s web of footpath and highway that connects every building to every other, that makes every house the same. The usual ratio is one Expanded Man or Woman per threat to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but this is no simple ‘zine or bioterrorism cell. It may be the only chance to sop up the infestation of America that too long festered at the edges of the Second World. The enemy’s culture must either be left alone, to die its unnatural death, or else helped along its creeping doomy way. Soviet reason and truth shall shine through the corrupting shroud that is America, and socialist-elementals will rule everywhere forever and ever amen.
‘Cause everyone’s my friend in New York City
And everything looks beautiful when you’re young and pretty
The streets are paved with diamonds and there’s just so much to see
But the best thing about New York City is you and me
Lottie the Human Log, Texan and professional circus freak, sleeps under the stars of the Southern Hemisphere with her friends and allies. She misses Tommy her husband, crushed under a falling tree, and she misses Teddy her son (lost serving ninety-nine years for first-degree murder in Folsom State Penitentiary). She misses Newhart.
‘Cause everyone’s my friend in New York City
And everything looks beautiful when you’re young and pretty
The streets are paved with diamonds and there’s just so much to see
But the best thing about New York City is you and me.
The bad old man in the EPCOT Center, who once held Culture in his left hand and Merchandising in his right, feels constant pain. The tumors started in his lungs but spread to his kidneys and stomach. Every minute he’s awake is a minute of agony that none of the pills and drips and injections can stop. He should have died a long time ago, but he knows they need him. Without him, Culture would have dried up and blown away a coon’s age ago. He anchored it, tied it geographically first to the West Coast and then to the East. The glory should be his, as much as the blame. His great troubles began when he tried to extend America beyond its geographic borders, when he opened the park in Paris and one in Tokyo. The thick skin of America he sliced open with his plastic gift-shop theme-park knives, and Culture bled away into the sea.
It’s his duty to make things right. He can’t die until he finds Idlewild.