Free The Devil Never Sleeps by Andrei Codrescu

trivial, and, ultimately, political question: “Will this spill finally bleach me?”
    On the same subject, Jonathan Williams delivers a moralist’s blast at the enfeebling of the American mind, from “lorena to tonya.” There is much to gloss on here since I am an observer of popular culture, and I even know all the jokes. When I visited Milwaukee, a journalist took me to the site of Jeffrey Dahmer’s house, now a vacant lot with a big sign that said AWAITING TOTS DAYCARE. An old man with a whip in his belt and a spatula in his hand was walking his fluffy poodle by the fence, and when he saw us, he said: “I didn’t know him. Lived here 18 years. Maybe I saw him once or twice. First read about it in the paper.” The journalist said, “You know what I think about Jeffrey Dahmer?” “What?” I said. “He was just like us—he wanted to eat his lovers and keep them forever. Like the eucharist.” “Yeah, but we only do that metaphorically,” I said. “Maybe.” She didn’t see much difference.
    So you can add to the enfeebling of the American mind, the TV-induced inability to distinguish between literality and figurativeness. Eventually, every mother who says to her baby, “I will eat you all up,” will do just that. That’s the dystopian solution to the problem of hunger.
    Terence Winch curses Carl Sagan in his poem, and with him, the antiseptic utopia of space salesmen. Like most real poets, Winch doesn’t see space as the “ultimate frontier,” but just an extension of the military-industrial complex to a place somewhere over our heads. A few years ago, before the Challenger blew up, there was some plan to put a poet in space.
    One of the greatest gifts American technology has made to the living of our century is amnesia. But even amnesia comes in for a whacking, by Paul Auster, who regrets losing the details of his life through an American riddled brain. And Anne Waldman finds that she “forgot / I forgot something / amnesia of holocaust / amnesia for war & war & more war …” She has forgotten
precisely that which is unforgettable. What we would like to forget, if only it were possible.
    None of these culprits, to be sure, stand shelled for long. The more obvious sins of America are not so much excoriated as noted in their complex interplay with the poets themselves. It is Allen Ginsberg who most completely identified himself with his time and place. In his poem he accuses America of poisoning the world’s air and water, but it is his own body that is America. “Fire Air Water tainted,” he laments, followed by “poor circulation, smoke more cigarettes.” Four decades have passed since the poet’s curse, “America, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb!” In that time, Ginsberg and America merged. He, no less than the rest of us, stood no longer outside because the outside, like clean air and water, had vanished, another fin-de-siècle casualty.
    One can hear a harsh urgency now in the work of those whose bodies have become the battlefield of a new American politics. Here, in the arena circumscribed by the body, even Judeo-Christianity gets a new job. “The Voice kept tugging at my ear,” declares Jack Anderson in the persona of Noah, “ … nagging and ordering me / to tell the people of the city, ‘Because of your wickedness / this place will be destroyed.’” The place HAS been destroyed in the ravaged bodies of Michael Andre’s friends: “the tragedy of the homosexual today—all I can do for / such friends is make this hello to the magnetic / pole of death that draws us like the years. / I make few prayers while this cold Pole is pope.”
    William Burroughs takes on Christianity in the flesh: “what about the Inquisition, that stinks of burning flesh, torture, excrement—its stultifying presence imposed by brutal