in the era of the crab louse

At one point in the 90s, I was working in a closet in a building on the Yale campus that looked, for all the world, like a pile of giant dog turds ascending fourteen stories. A Philip Johnson special. I have always despised Philip Johnson’s work, and sitting in that awful structure confirmed my view of the man. Anyway, I was working for a construction company that was doing interior reconstruction work on some of the laboratories. I was depressed, because it is hard to sit in a closet all day. Plus, it used to contain chemicals, this closet, so there were taped messages everywhere proclaiming sterile area. This struck me as a downer to my natural optimism. Besides, I wasn’t used to the North’s winters, which, to my horror, swoop down upon you and enclose you in a cloak of gloom starting in October and muffle you fucking up until March. To cheer myself up, I played my little tapes on a boom box. One in particular would drive my boss crazy. He was rarely in, but when he was in, he would nest in the outer office. It was my Lords of Acid tape. Somewhere around then Lords of Acid did a sex tour with My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult and were arrested in Hartford or something. Anyway, exciting times, except for me in the closet. I thought they were sufficient unto the day thereof.

I hadn’t thought about that for a long time. Today, I went on a nostalgic little trip on YouTube, looking at a buncha Lords of Acid vids of yore. And it struck me that the lyrics to Crablouse almost exactly describe my feeling about how the body politic has been penetrated by war criminals of the Bush-Cheney-HillaryClinton type. For those who haven’t heard this rousing anthem, here’s the chorus and the second verse:

“It's there to stay, it sucks all day
It's there to bite, my parasite

The little vampire, horny and so greedy
It doesn't care about a penis and it's envy
It's intelligent, nasty and it's sick
A party animal, a pervert and a pig
If a crablouse gets mixed in your saliva
Stumbles through your body right into your vulva
Then waits patiently until a penetration
Gets it out of there and right into salvation.”

That pretty much summarizes the last six years, don’t you think? Since the coup, that thing has sucked all day, and it has sucked the political life out of many, while with others it has contented itself with their blood and ouns. Every day, another mass murder in Iraq hosted and enjoyed by the American taxpayer, another innocent frying in some Southern death and jim crow juke joint, another fake terrorist scare. This is the era of the Crab Louse. The hatchlings of its eggs inside us will be here for as long as I’m alive.