[Newspoetry] Paying the Piper

[DL Emerick]

The Four Worst American Presidents
Buchanan, Grant, Harding and Bush

We built a monument in South Dakota
to four of the best ever to serve
this wide and rolling wealthy land.

The sense of the American experience
is built in the idea of independence,
of a nation, like its people, free.

We started from the idea of self-rule,
that every man should be self-reliant,
and government's aid should be a plan.

Government was to make it easy to do
whatever was tough to do privately,
like repairing disaster-struck places.

Government was meant to off-set giants
who strode over the national scene,
wreaking havoc on others indifferently.

Government was meant to help the needy,
the widows and orphans and the poor,
the disabled, the jobless, the homeless.

Government was meant to be a friend,
there to help you in times of trouble,
and its price for caring was taxes.

Big George came in and robbed America,
tossing the treasury and its taxes out
to the most wealthy, powerful, greedy.

And Big George, having no plan to lead,
stumbled forward from crisis to crisis,
war in Iraq, fires in the West, floods.

Even bombs fell on the land of the free,
and every time Big George would say,
"It's not what anyone could've expected."

Well, there are plenty of reports about,
all of them saying what we did expect,
and all these disasters were projected.

But Big George never did prepare for it:
he'd be out sleeping, running, farming,
fishing and golfing and hunting, playing.

Big George just likes his face on film,
where he can look most presidential,
without even being remotely a leader.

If Karl could write the perfect script,
Big George would keep making promises,
failing to honor them in word and deed.

Big George appoints himself responsible,
names a crony commission to check him,
his buddies running the Hill do so too.

The name of the game is the white-wash,
we saw it under Nixon, this cover-up,
this pretense at being above wrongdoing.

Incompetence is no constitutional crime,
I suppose, if I understand our laws,
but it ought to be, if we are to be free.

But, whatever failures democracy has
come back to haunt the people's choice,
they freely chose their own bad leaders.

Democracy must learn responsibility,
or else its failings become tragic,
ignoring the true budget balances.

Government has a price for being there,
when we need it and want its help,
and that means a public willing to pay.