Alright all you cats and kittens, it's time for another reading from the Beats, because, you know, here at the Five Spot Cafe, we aim to please. This time around, we'll hear from Burroughs. That's William S., not Edgar R. {scattered laughter}

Of course you all know that. {pause} I mean, I hope you know that. {opens book} If not, like man I mean you need to get hep, and quick! {scattered applause, finger snapping. Somewhere in the crowd, a bongo can be heard}

Now, this passage is from Burroughs and Ginsberg's The Yage Letters, written many years ago but man you might think it was written yesterday.

Just dig what Bill was layin' down and tell me if you don't recognize some of those people currently down in D.C. and let me tell you- the 'C' don't stand for 'cool'! {laughter, applause}

This is called "Roosevelt After Inauguration" and I mean it, cats and kittens, when I say Bill predicted the future. Dig it: {long pause, then begins to read very quickly}

Immediately after the Inauguration Roosevelt appeared on the White
House balcony dressed in the purple robes of a Roman Emperor and,
leading a blind toothless lion on a gold chain, hog-called his constituents
to come and get their appointments. The constituents rushed up grunting
and squealing like the hogs they were.

An old queen known to the Brooklyn Police as “Jerk Off Annie,” was
named to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so that the younger staff officers were
subject to unspeakable indignities in the lavatories of the Pentagon, to
avoid which many set up field latrines in their offices.

To a transvestite lizzie went the post of Congressional Librarian. She
immediately barred the male sex from the premises—a world-famous
professor of philology suffered a broken jaw at the hands of a bull dyke
when he attempted to enter the Library. The Library was given over to
Lesbian orgies, which she termed the Rites of the Vested Virgins.

A veteran panhandler was appointed Secretary of State, and
disregarding the dignity of his office, solicited nickels and dimes in the
corridors of the State Department.

“Subway Slim” the lush worker assumed the office of Under Secretary of
State and Chief of Protocol, and occasioned diplomatic rupture with
England when the English Ambassador “came up on him”—lush worker
term for a lush waking up when you are going through his pockets—at a
banquet in the Swedish Embassy.

Lonny the Pimp became Ambassador-at-Large, and went on tour with
fifty “secretaries,” exercising his despicable trade.

A female impersonator, known as “Eddie the Lady,” headed the Atomic
Energy Commission, and enrolled the physicists into a male chorus which
was booked as “The Atomic Kids.”

In short, men who had gone grey and toothless in the faithful service of
their country were summarily dismissed in the grossest terms—like
“You’re fired you old fuck. Get your piles outa here.”—and in many cases
thrown bodily out of their offices. Hoodlums and riffraff of the vilest
caliber filled the highest offices of the land. To mention only a few of his
scandalous appointments:

Secretary of the Treasury: “Pantopon Mike,” an old-time schmecker.
Head of the FBI: A Turkish Bath attendant and specialist in unethical
massage.

Attorney General: A character known as “The Mink,” a peddler of used
condoms and a short-con artist.

Secretary of Agriculture: “Catfish Luke,” the wastrel of Cuntville,
Alabama, who had been drunk twenty years on paregoric and lemon
extract.

Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s: “Blubber Wilson,” who hustled
his goofball money shaking down fetishists in shoe stores.

Postmaster General: “The Yen Pox Kid,” an old-time junky and con man
on the skids. Currently working a routine known as “Taking It Off the
Eye”—you plant a fake cataract in the savage’s eye (savage is con man for
sucker)—cheapest trick in the industry.

When the Supreme Court overruled some of the legislation perpetrated
by this vile rout, Roosevelt forced that august body, one after the other, on
threat of immediate reduction to the rank of Congressional Lavatory
Attendants, to submit to intercourse with a purple-assed baboon; so that
venerable, honored men surrendered themselves to the embraces of a
lecherous snarling simian, while Roosevelt and his strumpet wife and the
veteran brown-nose Harry Hopkins, smoking a communal hookah of
hashish, watched the lamentable sight with cackles of obscene laughter.
Justice Blackstrap succumbed to a rectal hemorrhage on the spot, but
Roosevelt only laughed and said coarsely, “Plenty more where that came
from.”

Hopkins, unable to control himself, rolled on the floor in sycophantic
convulsions, saying over and over “You’re killin’ me, Chief. You’re killin’
me.”

Justice Hockactonsvol had both ears bitten off by the simian, and when
Chief Justice Howard P. Herringbone asked to be excused, pleading his
piles, Roosevelt told him brutally, “Best thing for piles is a baboon’s prick
up the ass. Right Harry?”
“Right Chief. I use no other. You heard what the man said. Drop your
moth-eaten ass over that chair and show the visiting simian some
Southern hospitality.”
Roosevelt then appointed the baboon to replace Justice Blackstrap,
“diseased.”
“I’ll have to remember that one boss,” said Hopkins, breaking into loud
guffaws.

So henceforth the proceedings of the Court were carried on with a
screeching simian shitting and pissing and masturbating on the table and
not infrequently leaping on one of the Justices and tearing him to shreds.
“He is entering a vote of dissent,” Roosevelt would say with an evil
chuckle. The vacancies so created were invariably filled by simians, so
that, in the course of time, the Supreme Court came to consist of nine
purple-assed baboons; and Roosevelt, claiming to be the only one able to
interpret their decisions, thus gained control of the highest tribunal in the
land.

He then set himself to throw off the restraints imposed by Congress and
the Senate. He loosed innumerable crabs and other vermin in both houses.
He had a corps of trained idiots who would rush in at a given signal and
shit on the floor, and hecklers equipped with a brass band and fire hoses.
He instituted continuous repairs. An army of workmen trooped through
the Houses, slapping the solons in the face with boards, spilling hot tar
down their necks, dropping tools on their feet, undermining them with air
hammers; and finally he caused a steam shovel to be set up on the floors,
so that the recalcitrant solons were either buried alive or drowned when
the Houses flooded from broken water mains. The survivors attempted to
carry on in the street, but were arrested for loitering and were sent to the
workhouse like common bums. After release they were barred from office
on the grounds of their police records.

Then Roosevelt gave himself over to such vile and unrestrained conduct
as is shameful to speak of. He instituted a series of contests designed to
promulgate the lowest acts and instincts of which the human species is
capable. There was a Most Unsavory Act Contest, a Cheapest Trick
Contest, Molest a Child Week, Turn In Your Best Friend Week—
professional stool pigeons disqualified—and the coveted title of All-
Around Vilest Man of the Year. Sample entries: The junky who stole an
opium suppository out of his grandmother’s ass; the ship captain who put
on women’s clothes and rushed into the first lifeboat; the vice-squad cop
who framed people, planting an artificial prick in their fly.
Roosevelt was convulsed with such hate for the species as it is, that he
wished to degrade it beyond recognition. He could endure only the
extremes of human behavior. The average, the middle-aged (he viewed
middle age as a condition with no relation to chronological age), the
middle-class, the bureaucrat filled him with loathing. One of his first acts
was to burn every record in Washington; thousands of bureaucrats threw
themselves into the flames.

“I’ll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate,” he would say, looking off
into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity.

That's good stuff...Gonzo journalism before Hunter Thompson.

quote:

A female impersonator, known as “Eddie the Lady,” headed the Atomic
Energy Commission, and enrolled the physicists into a male chorus which
was booked as “The Atomic Kids.”

On the money

Where's the link for the eye bleach in the Classifieds? Accurate predictions, but wrong President.

"Hoodlums and riffraff of the vilest caliber filled the highest offices of the land." Spot on, Bill.

Love it. Read it in Burroughs' voice. Used to be into the Beat writers. Got to see Ginsberg do a reading in '92

Read it for sure first but eventually listen to WSB reading segments of it:
https://youtu.be/5oNGioPWQas?t=84

As a young man, David Horowitz was a leading leftist ideologue, shaping minds via "Ramparts" and other how-to sources for the sheep. Life caught up with David and he developed "second thoughts" about the road he travelled. One evening he had a long-forgotten dispute with his old acquaintance Allen Ginsberg. No agreement was reached and has Horowitz left, Ginsberg shouted behind him "We'll get you through your children."

(paraphrased by memory from DH's "Radical Son")