In 1931 brought the Texas
And the National Guard to the
Largest oilfield America and certainly
Texas had ever seen, the East Texas
Sands, and threatened to shoot anyone
Who even attempted to put any of that
Bonanza blowout on a train.
There were of course no pipelines built yet.
But Bunker's father swore he won the thing at poker
And proceeded to ship the sweet crude underground
To teapot refineries helmed by Depression desperados
For clean as a whistle distilled Feds can't keep that
Off the train moonshine though it was. It did
Win World War II after all, what they tried
To bottle up until the right people arrived.
The swarm, that is, the collective of men who vie
To be relevant team up against the wildcat tyrant
Who will not bend, and will not lose
And changes the rules so we all live a little freer.
In his case he should've handed his life savings to Ibn Saud
Right then and there, in gold just as FDR put the foil
On this magnum charta of oil, his honestly stolen deposit.
But he was just a country salesman, read the room
But didn't think big, not like Daniel Ludwig,
Who ignored the imperatives behind the guidelines
And of course the guidelines too, unlike poor
Henry J. Kaiser, who actually believed his Superman act
Saved lives, though all he got for building the Grand
Coulee Dam was a Jeep, sold after his death to a Rambler wreck.
While Henry was making warships in days, speeds no one thought
Were possible, Daniel imagined the largest ship imaginable
And he would own it, and thus, everything in it. Tighter than
A steerage drum he hauled guano to titanium sand,
But mostly it was oil, persuaded U.S. taxpayers anyway
Or their proxies proxies proxy to pay for his private fleet,
For warring needs some oil, now don't it? But he soon
Ran out of enough of the earth's insides to carry, so he
Carved out of rough seas the biggest salt evaporation plant
In the planet's history, to feed salt to the thirsty paper industry
And to say he could do it. For no other reason than to win.
That's the man's way, inventing Acapulco accidentally,
While building impossible luxury getaways. And whole towns,
Districts, instantly, where the illogical has been planned away,
The same guy who thought to build a refinery in the Panama Canal
And taught the Japanese his way of shipbuilding, to make storage
Not war, brought them all the coke and iron they needed to ..
Whatever it was they needed to do, to feel they won.
The Indonesians gave him oil fields just to entice him
To come around. And he did, with a ticket to the golden lands
For the distant Australians, taking the spirit from the ground
As the Aboriginals might say, but to the Aussies seemed so smooth
It should've been a slam dunk, letting Ludwig build a private train
Through the most beautiful valleys of New South Wales to haul his
Coal past schools to his own private port, so he could hoard it all.
That was how things were done in those days.
But they wrote in the proposed reg he was unaccountable to law
And the nation joined ranks against him. Reclusive billionaire!
It was the reclusive part that sealed his fate. How can he rule
The world alone? Who pays a PR firm boutique wages to keep
His name out of the papers? Ludwig opted not to face his accusers
And doubled-down on his assault on the Amazon jungle,
The mis-conceived dream of planting Japanese trees for better
You guessed it, paper, only to have a clear-cut the size of
Connecticut turn horribly wrong, and the paper mill
He hauled from Japan could not handle the jungle
And the ecosystem couldn't survive his transplanted trees
And he was generally not held to account in any way,
Especially to himself, except for the bitter curse
Of his life being a complete waste, for having lost
The last, impossible quest, to be a shark among fish,
Prove that man can make nature his bitch.
