Why WAMPA?

There may be a few things about any big project
That people don't like.
No matter how hard we try on any big job,
Something unexpected turns up.
The only people who don't make mistakes are those
Who do nothing at all.

WAMPA is a great national poetical enterprise
To get something done.
Mistakes may be made,
But we can be sure the American poets
And their pals, the American people,
Will not make the mistake of doing nothing.

Meaningful work can be hard to come by these days.
Machines and immigrants
And exploited people of all types
Take our places
In our communities and around the world,
So there is no real hard work left for us.

Our bodies atrophy,
Our minds are glued together with entertainment,
Narratives of heroism, violence, and seduction.
Many of us denounce the stupidities we depend on
And yet we crawl back to the trough
To look away from the main, cruel fact of modern life:

Work keeps us from going nuts!
And yet, work is horrible, who wants to do it?
Give it to the machines, give it to the exploited immigrants,
Give it to the other exploited people of all types,
My job will be to sit in a chair, Nuts, Yes!
Rubbing fiction and images from TV and computers
All over my body so I won’t disappear!!

WAMPA (the Work and Maddening Progress Association)
Is a new group dedicated to doing the good work:
Providing meaningful work to millions of Americans
To help them not to be nuts any more.
The work of the future
That will be required of all in the society of the future
Is: waiting for machines to operate.

WAMPA is what we will do while we are waiting
We will make our every moment work
We will visualize and we will see
We will idealize and we will strain our eyes
WAMPA provides conceptual work
In the service of exceptional benevolence
To everyone who asks for it or needs it
(Or 35 million people—whichever comes first)

WAMPA pays every WAMPA employee
A subsistence wage sufficient to provide
For all basic and for many advanced needs
And because WAMPA scrip (our instrument of payment)
Is based on thought itself
As well as on thought’s big sister (ideology)
WAMPA scrip has all the power of positive thinking behind it!
Take some home today! It represents our commitment to you!

We will get you back on your feet
Waiting and thinking and every moment of it
Will be such hard work your feet will ache!
You’ll be lifting up one foot, lifting up the other!
Soon you’ll be walking, waiting, and thinking at once!
There’s nothing to wait for but total human obsolescence!
It’s right around the corner, and after that
Waiting and thinking will be all that’s left for you to ever do.

At WAMPA we’re giving you a head-start into the future!
As you put the future into practice
By doing the future’s work today,
You will be amply rewarded
Because the future is much better than the past.
Get there first! Get better first!
It’s you who’ll lead the way to betterhood
Walking and talking and thinking and waiting at once!

Or lying down!
Or rolling on the floor!
Total human obsolescence means
Our bodies won’t have to do anything specific anymore
Our minds, and our very work, will become indefinite
This liberation is frightening, but inevitable.
WAMPA sleepwalks in a hurry to the future!
It’s better there, where all work must be found within
Indefinite and total liberation,
When there is nothing to be done the real work begins.

And WAMPA is paying you to get there first!
We are adding wealth to the country!
Work is the American Way!
WAMPA will give you the meaningful work to do
And pay for your basic and advanced needs while you do it
Because laziness is not the way in this wo/man’s country.
Work is every wo/man’s right!
We need the work!
And we can do the work!
When there is nothing to be done the real work begins.

WAMPA can put you to work TODAY.