Not In Our Exceptionist Backyard

Let the damn fool Euros go off and smash them whatever hadrons together, anyways

Wont find the tallest skyscrapers anywhere close to this proudly neglected urban blight

Not Even building the largest dams ta produce the most hydroelectric power around here

Ain’t taking the lead in some kind of flaky asteroid investigation mission, either, dammit

Don’t be looking for no far-too-expensive high speed rail in this here one nation under god

That next-gen thorium powerplant wont get built close to our artificially green backyards

My hopey-dopey-changey neighbor’s new solar panels are from china, not sunny SoCal

The greedy innovators of our banking geniuses aren’t backing no micro-finance revolution here

Not foolish enough to tax carbon emissions and threaten our mighty, yet oh-so fragile economy

Waitin on them Asians to ship us tiny, efficient cars that meet our new economic stations

We’re flocking overseas for treatment despite our havin the Worlds Finest Healthcare System

Listen, our kids dont need to be in the global top 10 in reading, math or science ta lead the world

Lettin others innovate that expensive smart power grid before we buy into it  - from them

Energy efficiency and buildin to last is simply not part of our Traditional Family Values®

Just get all them foreign PhDs on back outta here to teach and research and do startups at home

Our agribusiness don’t need ta lead globally by example in protecting precious farming topsoil

Wont find that worlds fastest internet in my neighborhood, not by a long shot, no Siree

Not even trying to produce like more food using less water, fertilizer and pesticides

But we are energetically increasing both our illiteracy and incarceration rates at the same time

Turnin our backs on reason, science and education just as fast as any heathen ayrab foreigners

Lettin our once-good drinking water poison us even as them Bangladeshis finally get clean wells

Nudgin our offshored multitudes towards the peasant lifestyle as Asians take to our former level

Not even demonstratin the benefits of diet, exercise and clean living to the whole world

Arent leading globally in bringing solar, wind and geothermal energy online either, by god

Satisfied back in the international pack in life expectancy, nutrition and infant mortality

Caint create the better jobs they promised when they reaped huge bonuses fer outsourcing us

Spineless coalition building aint catching on with us, the proudly polarized and paralyzed

Wont find none of our giant gas-guzzlers on the jammed streets of any crowded Asian city

Aren’t giving up our global lead in obesity, diabetes and hypertension, no way, not on your life

Proud to stand up against this costly, intrusive, messy and socialistic recycling hoax

Don’t ever bet on us not spending more on arms than all the rest of them losers combined

Aren’t building the newest ships here to bring over our imported oil and electronic gizzies

Replacing manufacturing with no-benefit, poverty-level service jobs faster than them all

Focusing on important issues like flag burning, abortion, gay rights, school prayer and gun laws

Not signing on ta this sustainability scam with the wack and weak-kneed one-worlders

Relying on god and the free marketplace for solutions, not their tired, failed social planning crap

Turns Out

Turns out there really were some reasons why we needed them silly bugs and birds and frogs

Now we see we should have been a little bit more careful with our once rich farming soils

It’s hard to believe that overfishing a few species brought on such a broad collapse

Who could have ever imagined that we weren’t actually our only one true god’s chosen people?

Guess we really should have paid just a little bit more attention to our crashing literacy rate

Turns out it was foolish to always spend so much building costly weapons and ginning up wars

Unexpectedly, it’s revealed that mergers and acquisitions were only for creating lavish bonuses

Despite everyone’s firm beliefs, that fabulous real estate bubble burst, just like all the others

Whoever would’ve thought the free market wouldn’t provide affordable universal healthcare?

Somehow we never noticed at all as we so rapidly tainted our vast stores of clean, fresh water

Turns out that our sheer numbers created problems too expensive and complex for us to fix

Wow, so those constantly rising temperatures really did mean something, in the end

Didn’t realize that sterile, bio-engineered moncrops would all succumb at once to identical pests

So surprised that filling the oceans with plastic particulates would collapse the marine food chain

Struck dumb by finally noticing that, when all the oil was gone, we hadn’t sought real alternatives

Turns out the bankers got it all so very wrong, even without burdensome government regulation

Turns out we shouldn’t have rolled empty credit card debt into our homes as often as possible

Why look at this, it really was stupid to pay $200/mo for phones and $150/mo for cable

Huh, so, snowmobiling, jetskiing and OHVing are actually destructive and not just family recreation?

Well, goddamn, those outsourced jobs don’t actually make way for the new and better ones for us

Maybe letting the greedy, vain and sociopathic be self-appointed Masters of the universe was wrong

Turns out that conglomerates could find it legal and moral to profitably adulterate their products

We never dreamed they’d lay us off forever at 50, in debt, with no savings, pensions or insurance

Cutting costs by blindly trusting outsourced, foreign ingredients wound up poisoning customers

Looks like giant, shoddily-built, energy-wasting McMansions might not be the way going forward

Stunningly, doctors and Pharma realized they made much more money on treatment than prevention

Turns out stalling safety regulations for more research always saved firms money in the short run

Later on, their own bloated estimates indisputably proved the problems were far too expensive to fix

Come to find out all our thousand tiny household sources did add up to a major pollution issue

How surprised we were to learn that double meat bacon cheeseburgers were not actually healthy

It seems silly that dutiful paper recycling was sent all the way to china just to wrap up more imports

Turns out the big banks were actually blackmailing the market with demands for a no-strings bailout

Turns out their imaginary only one true god was on their side just as much as our own was with us

Nobody guessed our kid’s future would not be brighter than our own was, once we were done here

Oddly, the all-important economy collapsed once it destroyed the very ecosystems that supported it

Turns out not even a trace of our messy presence remained after the passing of but one geologic era

How Much Progress Is Sustainability Worth?

“This proposal places too much burden on working families in terms of jobs and money” – Senate Majority Leader

How much sulfur emission will it take to keep our happy little family safe and warm

Sweetheart, is that nest of songbirds really worth Daddy’s job down at the cube farm

We don’t actually need any of these butterflies to keep the kids in school, do we, dear

Won’t they still make those happy-ever-after children’s movies even if all the frogs have disappeared

Honey, it really is a choice between our family and those cuddly-looking little bunnies

You see, if they get to live then we might have to change our traditional happy family lifestyle

Nature is real nice and all but daddy’s got to make money to buy us all of this nice stuff

And, you know I would chop forests, bulldoze meadows, poison rivers and stripmine hills just for you

How many good jobs is it worth to dump sex-changing chemicals into the little stream by our house

Just ask lucky pig farm employees where their antibiotics are building stronger MRSA for us all

What do the unemployed loggers say even as their clear cuts still silt up rivers and kill the salmon

How many caribou would I wipe out to still be able to commute alone to work to keep you happy

Little darling, we’re ripping up the fields to plant fake grass to help you grow up safe and secure

Daddy’s got to run that bulldozer so Mom can buy our white bread, chips and hot dogs

Environmental preservation is one of those luxuries our family just can’t afford right now, sweetie

After all, how many steady jobs is an inedible and ugly little desert fish really worth to us at home

Yes my daughter, the roof I put over your head today may indeed add a bit of PCB to your breast milk

But, if we don’t get food on the table today, our kids wont even be here to enjoy what we preserved

So we eat this tortured beef to help bring costs in line with our ever-decreasing spending power

What’s a bit more Grand Canyon smog if it helps attain coal-fired energy independence for our kids

Right, so we should regulate commerce because some exotic mussel may unbalance the Great Lakes

So what should we give up for soil microbes some study contends are so important to agriculture

Look, we’re barely getting by and you say we need to sacrifice more just to clean up the rain

I’ll trade a years work now for your sake against your distant future, my bright-eyed son

Hey, we’re just folks trying to get by and we got to eat and drive to work. Well, don’t we?

That 5 billion lbs of poultry waste drained into the Chesapeake each year keeps chicken in our pot

In the meantime, we only know the house loan just readjusted and the kids need new school clothes

So what if my job doesn’t really yield more than just cheap, takeout environmental destruction

Its worth building shoddy, overpriced dream homes if I can make the payments on the family pickup

Baby, we’re voting for coal and oil so you can grow up and have kids of your own

What percent unemployment would we tolerate just to make the wetlands safe for frogs

How many need go hungry so a few elitists might get to see the stars and experience natural silence

Sing along with Mommie now Drill-Baby-Drill, that’s it honey, once again, Drill-Baby-Drill

Look, we can barely afford our Cell and Cable bills, much less some liberal wacko’s carbon tax

OK, so we just turn down our air-conditioners, keep the windows closed, burn coal and vegout

After all, if we cant put food on the table what’s that fairytale ecosphere worth anyways?

Traditional Family Values, Copyright© USA

The right to morbid obesity is one thing I know we fought for way back during the Big One

Our forefathers most certainly would stretch their unemployment checks farther, down to Wal*Mart

We’ve sent our pre-diabetic and amoral children to simply be warehoused at schools for generations

The holy bible has always fostered a willful ignorance resulting in our ongoing righteous intolerance

Guzzling cheap beer from automated factories is a time-honored tradition we intend to honor forever

The founding fathers too, waltzed away from pointless credit card, ARM and HELOC debts

American families have been perpetually alert against big government healthcare takeovers

We’ve always relied on cheap imports built by slaves to artificially raise our offshored living standard

It is a time-honored tradition to graze on sugar, salt and fat before littering its plastic packaging

And daddy still brings home the ritual Double-meat-bacon-cheeseburgers for his nuclear family

Really, we’ve always only wanted giant, inefficient, over-priced road hogs, built to wear out quickly

Physical inactivity is another one of freedom’s rewards we all enjoy, but too often take for granted

The right to randomly produce loud noise during witless wreckreation shall not be taken from us

Like those who came before us, we can carry concealed weapons to church for self-protection

Good families have passed down obesity, heart disease and high blood pressure thru the ages

Our traditional family values truly are not some new ad campaign spouted by rightwing media heroes

A scornful pride in their illiteracy runs deep among those who have always answered freedom’s call

Yankee ingenuity lives on in our innovative outsourcing of design, production and support

Laying stuporous for hours, bathed in vapid electronic images, is a time-honored practice

Abusing successive waves of immigrants goes all the way back to our revered colonial times

Twisting literal scripture has encased us in a thought-relieving faith since time immemorial

Our native practicality and common sense have always protected us against that junk science

Pointless Spartan thrift was replaced by go-go, negative savings rate consumerism centuries ago

Unregulated, leveraged development progress shows the vitality of our hallowed personal freedoms

Factory institutionalization of their parents has long been a rite of passage for those of middle age

We have forever parroted as revealed truth the soundbites of smarmy, overpaid talking heads

Consumer spending and financial services have always been the true engines of our great economy

Long have we ignored the source of the food we graze upon and the energy we thoughtlessly waste

We hold as self-evident that every child should get shiny medals and not be left behind

The longstanding right to finance electronic gizzies shall not be abridged by socialist thrifties

Self-responsibility has ever been required when cast aside at 50 by the faceless multinationals

Preemptively-defensive wars of liberation have been our hallowed right, throughout our history

We’ve always had to decipher deliberately smallprint legalese to wager upon our retirements

We, too, are prepared to tithe 40% of all of our life savings to healthcare during our last year

A/C, heat, light, media, malls, cars and phones remain, as ever, part of our enduring heritage

Mindlessly chanting flavored slogans shall forever remain the way we cope with unnerving complexity

Never Quite Living Within Our Means

Been asking how them 3^rd worlders get by on less than we spend on a damn dog that we just ignore

Discovered we had made our full share of fool, empty noise and then some - Quite a while ago

Financing smaller portions of our happiness lately as it always seems to go stale so quickly now

Got too little righteousness left to keep demanding that everybody else listen to our wise counsel

Even started to consider paying interest on the vast debt we’ve lavished upon our descendants

Trying to find some homemade alternatives to unaffordably eating out 6 or 7 times a week

Laying off the yardmen, oilchangers maids, doggroomers pedicurists, lifecoaches and whatnot

Stopped trying to export morality when we finally realized our own precious children aint got none

Stunned to see we cant afford to keep on doubling our sacred arms spending every ten years

Radicals among us are questioning $100 a month just sos the kids can send unlimited texts

The perpetual $150 cable and internet plans are raisin our outsourced eyebrows, as well

Even wondering if our vast good fortune might not be just dumb luck, and not gods divine blessing

Shrill voices are whining that Middle East war and oil dollars should stay right here at home

Gonna step away from this ratcheting, underwater mortgage we’ve re-fied twice for free money

I’ll get a less expensive lease on a new car and then walk away from that tired, 3 year-old dog

To maintain a competitive financial position, even our banks stopped paying their own debts

We’re savin big on generic cigarettes, beer, hamburg and chips – And, Hell, we’re gettin by

Learning thrift, gambling with my 401k on the market and getting point1% interest at the bank

Realizing we must become experts in complex financial cons and medical insurance billing scams

And now even TV says you cant finance the lifestyle of the rich and famous on a negative savings rate

There are even some whispers that we cant afford to act out as world cowboy sheriff no more

Let em go ahead and repo the snowmobile and jetski and the OHV - They’re trashed anyway

Getting our house in order by slashing education, environment and child welfare spending

Realizing we need to welcome foreign workers to come help pay for our forced early retirements

Cutting costs not having the Chinese build em better than they have to be, or even ever to be fixed

Emerging competitive from bankruptcy by reneging on all promised retiree benefit obligations

Showing financial sense by strategically defaulting on my fortune in mindless credit card debt

Wondering about all those worn-but-once clothes hanging there catching dust in the wife’s closet

Supporting drilling deregelation cause gas prices are way too high for the honest working man

Its becoming clear that Clean Coal is The quick and cheap, green way to energy independence

Started bringing lunch from home now and again, and, Hey, it ain’t even really all that bad

Demanding a smaller government, under God, but you best keep your hands off of my Medicare

Postponing water, sewer and power, school and dam, road and bridge funding until way later

Some are suggesting that even ever more school money will never be enough to replace parenting

Forgoing dental care, prescription drugs and doctor visits sos we can just pay the rent and eat

Yep, finally startin to realize that Within our means dont really mean With no money down