Dear Bill & Kate

Gary Corseri - Activist Post

Dear William and Kate,

A thousand apologies for this tardy response to your late-arriving invitation! (I must confess, after my first question, “Why me—a humble-as-kippers American poet?,” my second question was: “In this era of girdle-tightening austerity, why the gilded note; would some churls think that ‘bad form’?”)

The fact is, I am rather certain this invitation is a mistake; that it was, in fact, meant for Gregory Corso, a renowned “Beat” poet with whom I’ve been confused for decades, thanks, no doubt, to similar assonance and consonance in our names. If it was so intended, that would also be a mistake, since Gregory is no longer whinnying with us.

Frankly, I wonder why you’d bother to invite any sort of “literary type” at all—especially a pariah type like me? Why not stick with the safer bets: a Thomas Friedman, say, worth some $50,000,000 of married-into loot--a bloviating bloke who thinks your flat little world just fine?

Why me? Did I win some sort of lottery? Each day I’m deluged with news from Nigeria, Liberia and Malaria, congratulating me for winning billions in lotteries I had no idea I’d entered. To claim my prizes, I merely must send my birth certificate, finger prints, foot prints and certified eye scans. (Obama-type birth certificates will not do.)

And now, as I have declined the lottery invites, I must also decline your kind invitation. The fact is: I don’t know you. What I’ve seen of you on the inescapable mass media—the covers of magazines spying on me as I check out my Raisin Bran, the flashy images on CNN ad nauseum--quite honestly, I do not like. William is far too toothy, seems a bit serpentine, and Kate is too pretty to be with him--except for all that loot!

I mean: What did that guy do to deserve such luchre? (What does anyone do to “deserve” it?) Cause, you see, it’s getting kind of tight around here—and where you are, too—and a lot of us peasants are beginning to think: there’s an inverse proportion between money and democracy. The bigger the palace, the greater the malice!

I think it was Balzac who said, Behind every great fortune, there’s a crime. Thomas Paine went even further: he showed how the fortunes of the monarchies were based on the accumulated spoils of war; or taxing peasants into penury; outright theft from other “nobles,” and on and on. Why grovel before such ciminals? he wondered.

So, in 1776 and 1789, in 1848 and 1914, in 1948 and 1959—in America, in France, all over Europe, in Russia, China, Cuba, and at other times and in other places around this hurting world, we’ve thrown your kind into the sea or under the guillotines, or stood you before firing squads—to make you stop! Stop the thievery, stop the lies, stop the wars that line your bottomless pockets. (Okay. … Sometimes, as in Russia, we’ve gone over the top. No need ever to hurt children! If only your side felt the same way! Because you’re hurting children exponentially worse—all the time!)

Every time we think we’re done with you, you come back like raddish indigestion, repeating some unpleasant taste, worse each time belched up.

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