Wet Bank Guide

For Ashley Morris

My German and French Acadian people, who arrived 50 years before the “American” revolution, were sold to “America” a century after they arrived here, unconsulted, along with the slaves in the fields and the “merciless Indian Savages” who showed the founders true democracy and were crushed for it. All just another colonial commodity to the U.S.

I was raised on the revised pledge of allegiance, the one with god in it, on nightly film footage of Vietnam combat and lies when lies could still bring shame, could bring down a president. You lost me entirely somewhere between August 28th 2005 and the end of that year when it became abundantly clear the fucking United States was prepared to abandon New Orleans, the anchor of the continent’s great rivers of commerce, a city perched precariously at the edge of Gulf of Mexico oil, the production of which fueled freeway “America” and destroyed the coast that protects the city. The U.S. would abandon this city because it was mostly black and brown people but the godsons of cotton Uptown crafted plans for ethnic cleansing to make it more “American” and acceptable.

I am an accidental American (North, United States of) by an unfortunate turn of history. You tried to press me like my father's shirts into an Eisenhower/Camelot conformity, a tailored bliss. You failed. I nursed at the uprising against that in the 1960s and early '70s, reacting to the casual racism of my Southern suburban youth and the poverty that was carefully hidden behind elevated expressways. 

I was raised on rebellion and graduated into Reagan, welfare queens and Nicaragua and El Salvador and Iran (see also. missiles to). I lived through Iraq twice, 10,000 points of light (first star to the right), the cartoonishly bad Clintons, what the European press called the Coup of 2000, cheered briefly by Obama (my 7th Ward neighbors in their Sunday clothes and crowns on a Tuesday) until he started deporting and secretly bombing with drones other brown people more vigorously than Bush in his own quiet, mannered Obama way.  

Drunk bigots blowing shit up. Is there any better way to describe this holiday in 2025, to describe the United States in 2025. Come the Fourth, I'll fire up the global-and-burger warmer, pass on the noxious fumes of fluid for an old fashioned chimney and some newspaper (remember those?), eat the expected things and get drunk. I may try to get my partner drunk enough to drive as we go around and engage in the annual safety ritual of discharging the fire extinguisher wherever we see a flame or spark.

— Wet Bank Guy

Follow Mark Folse at http://wellbottomblues.com