Hell on Earth
I am sorry, dear brother, wherever you are:
I have horribly failed you. I have not fought
the tyrant in my own country, or figured out
how to fight the one in yours.
Please come to me and help me with your spirit
now that you have in so much pain
escaped this place, and I
uncomfortably remain.
Visualize the following scene: you wake up this morning next to your girlfriend or boyfriend, and the two of you make love. After making love, you kiss your them on the cheek and tell them that you're going out to the supermarket to get them some food so that you can make them breakfast. After arriving at the market and picking out your items, you are walking down one of the aisles with a basket of vegetables (mushrooms, onions, garlic, bell peppers) to cut up and put into an egg omelet for your lover, fruits, eggs, and pancake mix. As you walk toward the register, you are glowing with hard-earned happiness; you have bought this food with money from your job, which you don't like, but today is your day off and you get to enjoy the leisurely walk back to the house, and most of all the thought that you've been able to provide the person you love with a nice meal. You're smiling at the other customers who pass, thinking of how nice it will be to make love again after breakfast. As you near the cash register, something jabs you in the back, so hard that you fall forward onto the floor, smashing the eggs and spilling pancake mix all over the floor. Already you are humiliated and completely taken off guard. You turn, bewildered, and see a grimacing person in a military uniform standing before you. They are waving a gun in your face and screaming at you. You ask, shakily, what you have done to deserve this behavior on their part, and in reply the soldier, in broken English, tells you that you are being liberated from the reign of George W. Bush. You stammer that you didn't vote for Bush, that he took control without your consent. The foreign soldier tells you to shut up. He tells you that the market is now going to be occupied by his forces, for reasons you wouldn't understand, and he tells you to go home and keep out of harm's way. So you start to walk home.
Already you are terrified, completely robbed of the confident, happy feeling of just a few moments ago. And you no longer have breakfast for your lover, or for yourself. But you look forward to getting home to make sure that they're safe, and you want to snuggle with them and cry on their shoulder. As you walk towards your house, you hear sirens and see black smoke rising from nearby neighborhoods. And when you arrive at your home, you see that it has been caved in. Your lover is lying naked in the street on a dirty bedsheet, dead, with their face smashed in and their naked body gashed and broken in many places.
How do you feel? Thankful? Peaceful and rational? Ready to comply with the new leaders, whoever they may be? Ready to consider the reasons for invasion?
This is war. If I add warning leaflets being dropped from the sky to my little story, or radio announcements urging defiance against the standing government, it still stands as a perfect example of what war is, because much worse things are happening every day to people much like myself--people whose worst crime was living in a place occupied by a certain ruler who is no friend of theirs, whom they have never supported in any way except perhaps by fearful silence. Which is not admirable, but many of them face worse threats than the silent and scared among us do. This is the most important lesson we should have learn from September 11th: greeted with that scene on our own turf should have enabled us to put ourselves in the shoes of those who experience our attacks, like the man in Afghanistan who loses his entire family, none of whom are members of any military or terrorist group, when a misguided bomb lands on their houses. I like living in America, but if this country killed my mother and my girlfriend, I would certainly be driven to murderous rage against it--in fact, I would be surprised at anyone not moved to strike back with as much force as they could muster. If I managed to control my thirst for vengeance, I would still probably end up emotionally crippled for years, if not until the end of my life. Anything that unleashes this kind of very personal horror on the world is inexcusable. I am in favor of the death penalty for those proven guilty of rape or murder by forensic science, for instance, and I'm all for chopping the heads off of Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, if that's the only way to stop them, but often killing someone makes their ideas, no matter how corrupt, more powerful, because certain fanatics will see them as a martyr. And when we go to war with a whole country, we always destroy any odds of focused, just violence dramatically, and the guilty often escape in droves while the innocent perish and writhe in pain. It's happening now.
Since it is not likely that a candidate determined to stop these kind of hideous scenarios from being carried out will take office this year, I should consider this election for the sham that it is, and participate in it with that knowledge in mind, using my meager power only in preparation for better, more effective methods, such as the massive hunger strike I proposed. I also should keep in mind that I cannot count on any President for anything at all, and that I don't get a say in foreign policy--historically, Congress always goes nearly unanimously with the president when he declares war, and the citizens don't get a vote on such matters, so I'd better be prepared to do peaceful and illegal things, to commit acts of civil disobedience if necessary, as a better recourse than mere voting. If we read history, throughout the past century our Presidents have often performed their best services (for example, Kennedy signing the Civil Rights Act, an act which he had no plan to introduce but which he was moved to sign by massive protests that were met with state-sponsored violence and were becoming embarrassing to the US, partly because they were "furnishing grist for the Communist propaganda mills"--perhaps his conscience also kicked in, but it's clear that he allowed all sorts of discrimination against blacks to happen on his watch and, provided with many constitutional biases for legal military action, still did nothing until forced by popular revolt) only under extreme pressure from concerned citizens. They have time and time again lied to their people, especially concerning foreign policy, whenever they felt it was necessary. They have usually resisted positive change until it became impossible to do so without causing an embarrassing revolt. Most of them have not been intellectual giants, or really creative and exciting people, either. (That's our job.) Bush is walking firmly in their footsteps. He is only looked upon as an enigma because he has such an incredibly shrill, annoying, and thuddingly stupid personality that he has managed to annoy Americans enough to get a larger portion of them to vote than would have been thought possible four years ago. Since those newly converted voters aren't usually the kind that get polled by the Gallups (because they're living in VW vans without access to phones, maybe?), Bush may be in for a much heavier defeat than anyone's predicted.
I almost feel compelled to send George W. Bush a thank-you card for getting me to pay more attention to those in power. What I will not thank him for is the terrible self-righteousness and hypocrisy, akin to his, that he has stimulated at times in me and in many other people. After reading history, Bush doesn't look so different to me, morally, from Truman or JFK, yet he is looked upon as a startling mutant by many of our citizens, and the prevalence of vehement outrage against him would suggest that his Machiavellian policies are unique to history--yet they are not. I have never seen a political figure of any kind so widely despised. Perhaps Bush reminds us of the fact that our civilization has become a thoroughly mediocre and stagnant entity, and we resent him for it? And how many of us, faced with his position, would not commit many cowardly and despicable acts? How many of us would bow to pressures from big business in return for gifts, and accept luxury in return for being pliant? (to answer this, we must ask ourselves: how many times we've bitched about Wal-Mart, for instance, and then bought something from them a few hours later, because it was "convenient"?) How many of us are impatient, resorting to violence rather than using our brains and compassion, in our conflicts? How many of us would have the courage to institute the radical solutions that we propose in the relative safety of coffee shops, if we were given his power and access?
This article has been difficult for me to write; because every time I build up a sufficient load of righteous anger, I find myself yelling at my girlfriend about some ridiculous bullshit, and feel hypocritical for not fixing that before I take on the foibles of world leaders. I need to take the log out of my own eye before I attempt to remove the logging truck from Bush's. Speaking of logging trucks, that's another reason I'm voting for Kerry; he seems less eager to ransack the environment.
Notice my language? "Less eager to ransack the environment"--not: determined to protect it at the risk of impeachment, as he should be, since America won't mean much to anyone when it's covered in floodwaters and blanketed by smog and dust. We'll probably never have a great President again, which is why we have to smother our leaders with pressure until they are forced to pay attention to us, rather than merely expecting the next guy to be a little less horrible than the last. Otherwise we won't be able to live with ourselves for gracing a man with our vote just because he might murder a few less innocent children.
Note: if you think this article isn't very good, you may be right. I think that my poems are better and more interesting than my political articles. If I were a high-school social studies teacher with the freedom to use my own curriculum, I wouldn't have my students read this article, but I would make them read Howard Zinn's Declarations of Independence, anything by Emma Goldman, Machiavelli's The Prince (a cold and ruthless book masquerading as pragmatism which appears to have been bedside reading material for virtually every president of the past century), Ayn Rand's non-fiction political articles, and The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, because if they read and understood these things, they'd likely come out of high-school as people utterly superior to most of their "elected" leaders--and some of them would certainly write better articles than this one. I would also have them watch Mister Smith goes to Washington starring Jimmy Stewart, for inspiration, and to melt their cynicism, as it melted mine. Then again, I get choked up watching Capra's other big hit, It's a Wonderful Life, too. Some people think that's cheesy; and I say fuck them.
Luke Buckham says, "Current poetry, despite the fact that people like Simic & Sapphire have published great work, has become cluttered with cowardly, cliched, unmemorable verse. One of the most admirable features of humanity is that while the general public does it's job to keep fads & advertisers comfortably alive, the counterculture usually manages to preserve superb art. We can access work by Hieronymous Bosch even though he died nearly 500 years ago. Still, the work of great poets like Micheline & Norse has gone out of print, and this is shameful. It means that the counterculture could be doing a much better job."