FEAR ITSELF by Dennis Doph

beyond beyond . 55

Franklin Delano Roosevelt the hawk faced man
who served three terms as President of this
Beknighted country Three terms & then some
before he fell
By the Georgia wayside and Harry Truman took over
FDR said at the beginning of his first term
When half the banks in this country were in default
The Dust Bowl was raging in the Midwest
Territorials in the Philippines were openly revolting
His wife Eleanor was having lesbian sex with a woman
in the Army
FDR said: the only thing to fear is fear itself.

He was so right Good old FDR His words still
Ring true today What we need to hear when fearmongers
Stand outside our doors screaming their wares
We know there is so much more fear in store for us
All the rockribbed conservatives cringing
in fear of what they know
Will change their comfortable lives forever
The entire Solid South cringing at the thought
Of an intelligent man whose skin just happens
to be a pale coffee color
Whose mother was white as white could be
Being President of this ever beknighted country
They want to cling to the bull necked old Navy guy
who looks like
He's about to explode any minute And does explode
with regularity on the floor of the Senate

We are in fear of our own children whose savage rites
We don't understand Even the reason for them to exist
The rites not the children In fear of our parents
going down
To impoverished death In fear of the doctors
Who scrape our wallets dry Even at the spectre
of the common cold Soccer Mom whose trusty Range Rover
took her handily
From playschool to playing field finds herself shelling out
Four hundred bucks a month to transport those little suckers
Fear takes hold of her Right where the Tampax should be
while she's standing at the gas pump

Still the Old Tigers whose approval soared to 80 + percent
After 9/11 They all blew so hard most of us believed them
(but not this cat) -- still the Old Tigers show no sign
of changing their tactics Ignoring global warming
Ignoring demands for living green
Ignoring the screams as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae crash
Now we understand with horror they're using the good ol' CIA
Our all-purpose agent of terror and subversion
To create new nationalistic wars on the outer fringes
of Kurdistan and Baluchistan
Yeah those outer fringes touching Iran

Iran will be fighting a red hot war on two fronts
Funded and sustained by our tax dollars For those of you
Who are taxed And Oh Our Advisers Blackhawk
Halliburton will be right in there setting up shop
No matter
What a new Administration chooses to do or tries to do
We'll be in the soup all over the Middle East
None of our Superheroes will be able to save us
Iron Man will just turn a deaf ear
And do another line Hancock will lie back in his sweats
Grab some more of Charlize Theron The Hulk will revert
To being Ed Norton for good and go back to his bad old ways
at the Fight Club
Christian Bale will forget where he put his flying suit
None of them Not one of them will be able to make us forget
our fear

While all of this is going on more and more of us queers
Will get married and raise cats The anally retentive guys
at Focus on the Family will have conniption fits
Try to take it all away from us
It will be too late All of the old reasons for our fears
Have drifted past their sell-by dates All of us old
Unreconstructed Liberals will have brand new fears

Like
How to behave when David Petraeus is acclaimed
Emperor of the Western World
And civil liberties in this country (this beknighted republic)
are shut down forever