Hey Buddy

24.12.1997

Hey Buddy, yes you in the white shirt

Who never seemed to have touched the dirt

Allow me humbly to demand

A bit about of what you dreamed

When you where young and still a child

Before you started to run wild

Before you went to make your hits

Before you went for bytes and bits

Before you learned to make your way

Through fields of cheating and decay

Before you taught the world to feel

That you are made of stainless steel:

What are the goods you’re looking for

What is your reason to make war

Who is it whom you wish to bomb

Whom will you hit into his womb

What is your reason for career

Hey, tell me what you are doin’ down here?

How does it feel to have the wit

To be a four billion dollar hit

To suck all minds and make a whim

Out of culture, thought and reasoning?

Hey man, there’s no way to escape

You too prove that we’re but an ape

Our physicists already proved

How far we got, how far we moved

And that human intelligence

Means to hold our own end in hands

That the real sense of history

Is the extermination of all humanity

You didn't have to prove again

What from such ‘intelligence’ we gain

There’s hardly time that will remain

Half the world’s already gone insane

The other half will follow soon

(You never really reached the moon)

You too will soon come to an end

And still believe that you were intelligent

Go an and make your way to death

By gosh, your profits take our breath

How does it feel to be the prophet

Of a digital religion you created

To be a hero of our times

To work constantly to make the chimes

Flash, bur not of freedom, nay, of those

That accompany the noise of a slaughterhouse?

Tell me more about your politics

(For instance: How you will get your future kicks

While you are cheating us with your newest tricks

For instance what do you think will be seen

As the newest features of „Word seventeen“?

Or will it ever be worthwhile

To buy the twentieth version of Excel?

Or will you finally get your kicks

With the ultimate „Windows twenty-sixty-six“?)

C’mon, tell me more about your politics

Nay, that is definitely not route sixty-six

I tell you what, the route you’re on

Will lead you straightway to Babylon

Or may I say it it quite direct

You’re busy to be it’s architect

And the end, that is plain to see

Is the end of the rest of humanity

I could decide that this is fine

Because it means your own decline

Hey Buddy, do you have a child

To be born into this world

And do you really think it’s birth

Is of any human worth?

Do you think your contributions

To the form of social institutions

Beside your capital interest and profits

Are of any human benefits?

Hey, listen, King of Babylon

It’s a destructive road you’re on

You invest all of your properties

To keep mankind down on it’s knees

While you may think you are the king

That’s come freedom to all to bring

While the bells of freedom that you ring

Should keep us all from reasoning

And while they toll from every steeple

That and why you killed your native people

A gift that you are up to give

To any alive alter-native

To teach us all why we are here:

To make career and to make career

I see that you might seem to say

That hasting forward is the only way

To beware from falling on a slope

That leads to falling interest rates

For your enterprise and capitals

If people thought about to tend

To be themselves intelligent

If only they had the light to see

Not to leave it to programs and machinery

And to lead a life without your dope

Yes, you believe you’re mankind's healer

With the business you’re in

But instead you’ re but a dealer

With kind of programmed heroine

I can be sure you get your kicks

With designer drugs made out of bytes and bits

You preach about the human rights

Meanwhile you’ve posted your armed knights

At every door, on every hill

And still they are ready for to kill

You built of bits and bytes a dome

To surmount Egypt, Greece and Rome

It is meant for to guarantee

To waste all our resources and energy

There’s hardly more than that to say:

You’re heading down the road to doomsday.

I listen and hear you ask and say:

„Where do you want to go today?“

But let me ask you while you’re here

Where must we all go next year

Or maybe in two or three decades

If you go on to make your grades

In such a way that must imply

Such a monstrous machinery

Not to mention the destiny

We’ll reach, let’s say, within a century

Don’t you think your phantasy

Might have dumped down reality

While you have filled up your stack

With a cover-version of star-trek

Where your commandments easily

Reach to every point of ‘our’ galaxy

While deep down in hangar six

Unseen dwarfs work hard to fix

For their life’s sake and for to survive

Every mistake of your life?

Take a look at yourself at the hour

You’ve become a monstrous dinosaur

All the windows that you paint

Are an illusion on a plane

Nothing but digital machinery

And nowhere a pathway back to reality

That’s how you do the monster-mash

Gain dollars, power, bonds and cash

While the world may remember still

Charming short-sighted little Bill

Cleverly you amalgamate

With circumstances that you take

For granted simply as they are

You never wanted to be revolutionary

Money is your destiny

And greed must be the place you’re from

Look at what have you become

In every country at the hour

You mingle with social and political power

What started in a young boys wit

Has turned out to become concrete

It binds together to be hardest form

‘Modernity’ and what it came from

And the Fuhrer’s men reenter

To become a technical education center

Authorized to be the generals

Of intelligence and social health

You pretend to sell logical machinery

But it serves for all to be

Slaves and only to succumb

To become stupid and numb

What could have been a means to logic

Turns out to be a simple trick

To make fools out of everyone

And education remains undone

Instead teaching ways to precision

And means to make one’s own decision

You sell a drug and in the end

It’s only your program that’s ‘intelligent’

The machinery becomes logical

Everyday life remains irrational

The programs will be full of wit

And their servants turn to be shit

Could the end of your computerism

Be something like worldwide computerfascism?

An army of your brain-washed dogs

Synchronized by your computer-clocks?

And Intel© runs them - ohne Scherz

By let’s say eight-hundred megahertz?

To rule the world and get their kicks

By computerfascist inner politics

The loss of political bipolarity

Fits well into your business phantasy

You do not at all have to be bothered

That your sinister plans are smothered

Still in the meantime you rely

Upon your missiles by and by

You can make peoples wages fall

Your profits in return grow tall

The price for oil is growing far?

You lead a merry little war

Your friends are grateful and they clap

Their hands, and profit’s up

While the best your programs can

Do, is stir missiles to Iraq or Iran

Launched by president Bill or secretary John

And the eternal advisers of Babylon

I tell you, if you go on that way

There will be nothing more to say

About your holy cow that fights

All over the world for ‘human rights’

While you deliver the amp’s

For a new type of concentration camps

I dare say you do not fight

For anything like a human right

It’s part of your advertisements

While all concern, and means and ends

Are pointing to a dollar, Bill

Who minds a tiny little kill

As long as all’s just business

And you get more and others less

Instead to say all that’s in need

Means: You are fighting for your greed

Ba the way: it’s a question of definition

To discriminate what is not and what is human

And human is this special sense

Is what contributes to your ends

You want to drive the biggest cars

Go to the most expensive bars

You want to run the biggest houses

Have the most beautiful spouses

Frequently turn down to ashes

Anybody to disturb your consumer wishes

And surely the highway you’re on

Needs an ever rising income

At any cost, the causes set

By it don’t make your fur wet

Nor do you see blood on your hand

You’re living in the promised land

For all the world you are hands on

What to your natives you have done

To practice and to exercise

What has become your first success

Who should blame you for the strategy

Your native culture was your enemy

Hardly more than a century ago

It drove you out and made you go

They did not need you in their place

Your ancestors were no success

They had to leave their native land

Nobody there lent them a hand

The only way for you to culture

Led you through a foreign future

And now it’s your turn till the day

A stronger one fights trough it’s way

A future day might come and sees:

The final winner speaks Chinese.

But let the cannibals that win

Be white, black, red or Ming or Han;

Beneath your white shirt it will show

Tyrannosaurus Rex art thou.

You on your ladder of career

You are a veritable man-eater

You are the cannibals lost in the mist

Of the ideologies of a well-payed anthropologist

That teaches for you - it’s his duty

That you are long left in history

You paint the picture of a cannibal

It’s clearly seen, he has no cloth at all

Or hardly some, to cover his genital

(It might cover at least one ball)

He lives within a wooden hut

He drinks from a wooden water but

For days he has not taken showers

He comes in feathers and in flowers

His women are easily to impress

With cotton shirts and pearls of glass

No dentist ever saw his tooth

His skin - unlike yours - is not smooth

But what -no doubt - impresses most:

He is not yet (sufficiently) computerized

And he is not really christian

Before he turns his first TV-set on

To receive the final mental good

From NTV and from Hollywood

Shortly, the picture that you give

Shows: cannibals are primitive

Instead you bear - it’s plain to see

Social responsibility

You trade it far and trade it wide

You take it for your personal pride

As long as there is you and your white shirt

Civilization will proceed.

dedicated to Robert Crumb