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Video transcript:
This is for the 45 lies campaign.
The title of this piece is 1 through 45 have lied, 46 through 100 will be no different. And it is in conversation with the piece "I want a dyke for president" by Zoe Leonard.
Oh silly humans, how quickly we forget.
We who were once ruled by thrones
and those who told us they were born to sit upon them.
We the descendants of those who overthrew dynasties and decapitated dictators.
Who are we, in this moment, to not remember how much we've already overcome.
How dare we dream so small.
No, I don't want another four years of Trump.
I don't want any republican for president.
But I don't want a democrat either.
No democrats, no dykes, no people who've been unemployed.
I don't want a black woman in office.
Not Oprah, Ava or even Michelle.
No immigrants in the oval.
I don't care how many or which drugs they've done, I don't want a president at all.
After all, what is a president but a small king?
An emperor whose new clothes I cannot see.
An agreement we made collectively that we can unmake just as easily.
I pledge no allegiance to America because white men defiled it with borders and called the result a country.
I do not confuse dying to vote with dying for freedom even though they meant the same thing
at one time in history.
I will not beg for a seat at a table whose legs are bent backs and we dine only on scarcity.
I want us to dare to dream beyond the dictates of this dystopia.
To say that the ending that so many feared was coming came long ago and we have simply been living in it's shadow.
I want us to admit more than this being a failure from the start.
To say America never was great and never can be.
That sometimes, sometimes the rot is so deep in the root that a pruning does not breed possibility.
That the only hope for a harvest lies in the fields being re-sown entirely.
And I wanna know why this isn't possible.
I wanna know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always needed, that a country is always needed,
that the police are always needed, that any of this has ever been and will always be needed.
And I wanna know how after slavery, genocide, colonialism and all of the ways that they've renamed the taking, how in the world that they convinced us that they knew how to run one better than we did, or do.
And I know it's sometimes hard to imagine
that all of us can truly get free, but I need you to believe that we already are.
I need you to believe that we always have been,
no matter the master or the monarch, but only if we dare to dream beyond what we can see, only if we understood that re-skinning or re-gendering the beast would never change a rumbling in it's belly.
See sometimes, sometimes I daydream I will live to see a day that a child is born so free that they will hear this poem and wonder what the hell a president even is.
And I believe that we can do it.
And I accept that we will be ourselves in the doing.
I accept that there will be disagreement, that we will conflict as we unravel our imposed inhumanity, as we realize that we have less to learn than to unlearn as we remember our collective body.
And I wanna know why this isn't possible.
I wanna know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always needed, that a country is always needed,
that the police are always needed, that any of this has ever been and will always be needed.
And I wanna know how we were asked to write to one lie, from one president in one poem, as if the sum of this country's presidencies have been anything but an untruth.
45 lies, yes, but so did 44 and so will 46, and so will our writing if we do not speak to the entirety of this.
Oh silly writers, how quickly we forget.
We who were once ruled by thrones and those that told us they were born to sit upon them.
We the descendants of those who overthrew dynasties and decapitated dictators.
Who are we, in this moment, to not remember how much we've already overcome.
How dare we write so small.
So this is the second sonic mashup I've seen today, what have I missed?