I asked the band to play Dixie,
Not wanting to be a real dick, see,
But I’m beginning to revise
What formerly I thought was wise.
You see, I felt the traitorous South
So foul in deed but sweet in mouth,
Would accept magnanimity
Gentlemanly, and graciously.
As it turns out, all that politeness
But masked a certain kind of “tightness,”
That hospitality so famous
Came at expense of some black “Amos,”
Arising not from any white—
It turns out they were rather “tight.”
I gave those rebels such a pardon,
But who’d of thunk, their hearts would harden,
And when emancipation came
Folks would subvert in all but name
Principles of equality.
I guess the laugh was had on me.
Now, I’ve awoken from my slumber—
As president I was a bumbler
According to the two-bit critics
Who had their specious analytics:
Why, if they’d been a-tweeting then
I’d of been the most mocked of men,
Except the bullet of John Booth
Woke everybody to the truth,
That, though in fine particulars
I sometimes landed on my arse,
Yet on the whole I took the job
Real serious-like, not a “nabob
Of nattering negativity”
As holds the office presently—
You might say that my equipoise
Was like that bloke from Illinois
(No, not that Reaganomix cracker
From Dixon who was quite a slacker),
Referring to Barack Obama,
Who offered hope and scoffed at drama
Unlike the present drama queen
Who only wants to “cause a scene.”
Admittedly, I had my faults—
I wasn’t hurling somersaults
Over the Negro’s intellect
Though I knew then, and retrospect
Confirmed me it was circumstance
Depriving men their rightful chance—
Black men I mean, a Frederick Douglass
Who held the apex in our struggles
Gave ample proof unto the lie
That blacks must fail the syllabi
Of Western governmental theory.
But here’s the thing, I find it eerie
(Which, given that I am a ghost
Should weigh more than a Facebook post)
That after all these years I find
That it’s the whites have lost their mind:
The blacks are all engaged in thought
While histrionics overwrought
Comprise the white man’s crie de coeur
As though thinking were to deplore.
Douglass and I were unified
Believing that to subdivide
This nation into different parts
Would harm mankind by fits and starts:
Today I have no confidence
That all of this made any sense.
What most surprises me today’s
The part that my own party plays—
Republican, if just in name,
The G.O.P. is not the same.
It argues against liberty,
And raises traitors up to be
Role models, slaveholders applauded,
And voting rights themselves defrauded.
Who would have guessed, that in a crisis
(As always, time to time, arises)
A president and party would
Side with the bad above the good,
And call Secesh and Nazis “nice.”
That “everybody has a price”
Is not a theory I affirm,
But politicians make me squirm
Especially of this modern type
Subverting truth to bandy hype.
By God—with science disrespected
How candidates can get elected
Espousing a new kind of Gospel
Where “love thy neighbor” is impossble,
Flouting basic civility...
How it can happen’s beyond me.
So I disclaim and disavow
The racketeers subverting now
The party which once helped men cope
As shined a beacon: change and hope.
Truly Obama’s of my party:
You’ve got the horse before the carty
To think that actions scarcely matter
Or lies accepted when they flatter.
No, there is not a decent man
To call himself Republican
Subverting all the rule of law
So some dictator can guffaw
Supported by his acolytes
While stripping others of their rights!
Still, Fred and I knew human nature,
Obama had the nomenclature,
But except freemen step to plate
The country’s lost to fraud and hate.
You can’t fool all folks all the time,
And men with conscience call a crime
When evidence before their eyes
Reveals events all should despise.
The party I belonged to died,
But that’s not what splits me inside,
Which, as a railman (my teeth gritting)
I know a thing or two about splitting—
It’s rather that, their aims at odds
With men’s best interest, even God’s,
So to achieve the upper hand
The Constitution should be canned,
Gutted within, to prop some thugs,
Abomination met with shrugs
As they count profits in the bank
At which expense a country sank.
Perhaps we should have hung them all—
Benevolence led to this fall.
While I have faith in humankind—
This country to the trash consigned
If present actors have their way—
It will not last another a day,
As humankind, without distinction,
Pursued its ultimate extinction.