Forget The Alamo By George Wallace

Alamo Alamo wicked and small, insignificant as cotton candy, no bigger than a 7-Eleven but it's big enough, situated at the crude corner of capitalism and death and no excuse for our inhumanity; Texas poplar, Alamo Alamo, adobe symbol of a nation that chased away the giants that lived in the mountains, a nation that spread like snapdragons through sedge and brush and coiled like a snake;

A nation stolen a nation lost, a nation justified by its own self-proclamation of the ‘higher purposes of European gods,’ Alamo Alamo the lost glory of a doomed and precarious age, foisted on the new world by Disney heroes in the blueblood mist;

Forget the child stolen from her mother's arms, forget the barbed wire and the practicum of death and domination; forget the finer points of crime and civilization, the DNA modified in factories to burn patriotism into our brains;

Forget the soldiers dead or blinded on either side; the martyrs the mothers the lovers and comrades; the orphaned child the grieving fathers;

Alamo Alamo victors vanquished villains exposed cowards and heroes, all slaughtered, all the young bodies spilling out like the foam of god in a dirty river;

And the sign of the cross so open and wide (the sign said open so of course the settlers poured in, armies of traders, scouts and bankers and soldiers and thieves);

No more the bear hunters and Shenandoah gamblers no more the sun-struck wanderers stripping tendon from bone and blood from blood, no more the marauders and Jim Bowie blades flashing;

(The children of the '50s in their coon skin caps are the masters now, cap guns blasting, tenderloin ties and ten gallon hats)

Never mind the nomenclature of nations, Mexico America England Spain, never mind the Empire of the Aztecs ripped like copper from the spine of the Andes; all blood spills in the same direction, back to the vulture governments in distant capitals, back to the priests and brokers and politicians;

And forget the partisans dying in the sun, and the solemn eyed peasants scratching corn from dusty furrows, and the sloe eyed men taking siesta in the unforgiving shade;

And there are ghosts of presidents, and there are spectres of presidents yet to come, and none shall avail -- neither the admirals of the plains nor the generals draped in their rotten sails and tentpoles; it is all dead timber, the apparatus of an empire no longer at their fingertips;

And a nation built on murder dies by murder and a nation that loves its guns and thrives on gun-dreams is a nation that makes it the job of one to kill many and rocks us into its vicious web of vampire-sleep;

And the sign says open for business, so of course we come, and the tourists pour in, and anyhow it's the Alamo and it's Presidents' Day and nobody knows what they are celebrating for;

And the bomb-sweat and the death covered brow, and the fireworks going off and the bulldozers rolling;

And the wives and children of refugees buried alive weeping like poplars in the freezing Texas rain.

These terrible, ordinary adobe walls, washing home to the sea from whence they came