Please leave me alone. I do not need this.
Democracy will not die this weekend.
It died in nineteen-eighty-four, you know.
Didn’t you know that? I did, way back then.
When I was twenty, I predicted that,
And as ev’rybody knows, a young man
With twenty years of experience knows
It all makes sense at that point in his life.
With Nixon bombing Asia to bits and
Spiro Agnew set to take over next,
George Orwell’s date seemed decidedly fixed.
When a Hollywood huckster decided
To sell his soul to the Ayatollah
(Let’s be honest and call this payola)
It was plain to see democracy flee
Into Guantánamo, where they locked up
Men fighting for that same Ayatollah,
Men funded by Carter then jailed by Bush.
On Nine-Eleven, twenty-one thousand
Kids died of starvation and bad water.
The next day twenty-one thousand more kids,
And the next day and the etcetera.
Somehow this never came up in campaigns
To vote on issues that should matter most.
So please leave me alone. I do not need
To hear about the untimely demise
Of what the Greeks had already crippled.
No longer twenty, I know I don’t know,
But I believe that democracy must
Be a cat still with some of its nine lives
Or a dog now lying dead in the dust.