One of my favorite rants of all time. Every evening when the din of our ongoing political suicide abates a little, I hear it again as clearly as ever.
I Want a President
I want a dyke for president, I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president, I want someone with bad teeth
and an attitude, someone who has eatenthat nastyhospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and, been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.—Zoe Leonard, 1992
This is a wonderful rant. That we’ve never been allowed to have such people as President – or even in our representative governmental bodies – speaks to who holds power. And who will do anything they deem necessary to prevent the rest of us from playing in their little exclusive sandbox.
The fact that such people are still with us—are in fact everywhere around us—is still worth celebrating. If we have one real advantage over the death cults that have us on the ropes at the moment, that’s it. (I think of Paul Krugman’s brief, chraming videos, the way he modestly recounts the latest signs of the apocalypse, then signs off with an equally modest “Take care,” or “Have a nice day.” The guy’s such a teddy bear that you want to hug him, even though the fact that he’s the smartest teddy bear you’re ever likely to meet is kind of daunting.)