Loudersoft - A Music Blog Dedicated to Post-Alt Pre-NeXT'ers

It’s kind of narrowing and frightening to think that things the great American poet & author William S. Burroughs intended as a barb at the things we celebrate on Thanksgiving, in his brilliant monotone delivery of “A Thanksgiving Prayer”, are actually being repeated by people with sincerity in 2011. The Fred Phelps’s, Rick Perry’s and Michele Bachmann’s of the world seem even more delusional and self-evolutionary when you consider the following piece. The video, directed by Gus Van Sant, is a simple and agile affair, allowing the words and music which underpin the ceremony of delivery to leave their razor-sharp marks on everything they touch.

So Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and I hope you’ll think about what we’ve learned here today.

For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive
Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts

thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison

thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger

thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot

thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through

thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces

thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers

thanks for laboratory AIDS

thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs

thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business

thanks for a nation of finks

yes, thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your arms… you always were a headache and you always were a bore

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.