America America-- I am so tired of you

America America—I am so tired of you

And very near to saying I am through

You require so much petting and coaxing

To do the smallest right thing
Folk play ever more on your heartstrings

And even then you don’t do it.

Your truest friends prepackage their

Advice in microwaveable form

“In keeping with our deepest traditions….

“And military norms” –

Our what? Dazed and shaken

I am seeing stripes and stars

  (For any full encounter with either

  Would put the truest friends behind bars.)

America, how can you ask for such flattery -

Have you not burned children and women and men?

Is there any other nation that dares ask for such cossetting

To be convinced not to do it again? --
Oh America, you used atomic weapons against

A civilian population

And if the entire world ends it will be due

To weapons of your creation – and still you tell me:

“You must reassure me that I am the greatest nation
Otherwise, you get nothing.

Maybe if you tell me how great is my promise

And wonderful my turkey stuffing

I will consider listening to you” – I see the game you’re playing

The truest friends fall for it each time, I hear one of them now saying

“The military strategy propounded by
Senator Dollfuss and Representative Coughlin and

The Right Honorable Gerald L. K. Krupp is

Simply not first rate
  -- Yes, it really is beneath --

The excellent standards of excellence

That made this country great” –

In short, lying through their teeth

I am tired of the truest friends too

(Though not as much, America, as I am of you)

America, you get every single thing wrong --

Even the things you get right!

When you finally start up snorting

Like a hippopotamus from a sunbath

Your dimpled hippo brain thinks

It was the bird on the tree that woke you not

The mud beneath that stinks

America, I’ve even noticed that

When you killed people in the Philippines

It was because you were so very selfless

And every time you didn’t, because

For once you were too mean!

“We have to look after our own –

We don’t want to get involved in other people’s problems”

In short:

Every single time you make the right choice

  (From the consequentialist way of viewing it)

You make sure that first you’ve found the

  Very worst reason for doing it

One day, America, you will close the circle

And drop your outward pretensions

You’ll kill and be an isolationist –

Goldwater is your logical extension

America, you spend on every big war
But you care not a fig for

The savage penury of your streets where

            You relive your founding nightmare

And if ever you begin to shake and notice

Your own poverty, it will only be

Long enough to blame it on the English devil fish

America—you’d be funny if

You weren’t so deadly

--

Oh America, even now, after all this

You expect me still to close with some thrilling affirmation

Of your great destiny and exceptional fate

The wonders you have yet to perform –

As your other cajolers and advisers do –

I won’t.

You know very well I can’t promise you your future

After all, we might not be alive

You made sure of that yourself in

August, 1945

You have got to sort out your destiny for yourself

More, indeed than that:

You’ll have to do it without

Any special dispensation, but with the same

Crude tools bequeathed to every

Possessor of the mortal frame

Fighting like all the others against the evidence

Of your own human history and

Soul’s inheritance
And in the face of the knowledge of
What you have done and could yet do

Oh, stuff it America, I do love you