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Part I
A fearful post-apocalyptic vision came to me
As I heard the unbearable wailing moaning screaming
Dying gasping choking wheezing
Death rattles of these last days…
Though confused by its source
The world wind carrying them
Came it seemed at once from
The East ---The Middle-East ---
The North East --- Jerusalem -
Tel Aviv - The Gaza --- The West Bank .
A despairing Sudan and simultaneously out of
The exploding fire raining crashing
Crushing broken buildings of the City.
It was a plaintive cry from the home
Of every human being alive:
But the specter rose
From beneath the ash and rubble,
From alongside the dead and
Decimated tower residents and
Uniformed Rescuers and
Where lay the body of three decades of change…
We were revolutionaries in a world pleading for freedom.
From the bondage of repression and death
From under the crushing factory assembly line
Iron tank treads of Colonialism, Neo-colonialism,
Capitalism, Imperialism, State Totalitarianism…
And from their mutants heirs,
Racism, Sexism,
Classism and Genocide.
In Polispeak they reconfigured us into Savages,
Terrorists, Urban Terrorists, Radicals,
Rabble-Rousers, Traitors and Cowards …
It became a polyglot of never ending Media-speak…
An anti-advertising campaign that pounded
The ahistorical truth into the infantile
Cute pink and blue and grown up beige minds
Of America the Beautiful, I Pledge Allegiance to …
My Country ‘Tis of Thee...God Bless America…
We became morgue candidates
Awaiting execution in the ghettoes,
The prisons and in the jungles of
A Bolivia known as the 3rd world.
That they now confuse us with a portrait of
An omnipotent twisted zealot Bin Laden
As ‘The Middle Eastern Assassin,’
‘The Mohammed Che,’
Is yet another lie that slips from
The same serpentine tongues
That wove the images of Woodstock
Into the crazed guitar ramblings of Manson,
The peace songs of Lennon
Into the cast iron directives of Lenin,
The flowered garb of the millions stopping war
Into the Red collard tunics of Stalin.
If Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy
Dubya Bush no FDR, much less Lincolnesque,
Osama Bin Laden is no Che Guevara.
It is a lie sent wagging wetly into
The ears of a stupored Good Morning America and
Another live five hours of Prime time Cutey
Katie Couric bobbing up and down under
The patriarch chin of that other Bush …
Captioned as rare network fair.
I fear that the doves of peace and liberty
Will be soon be clutched in
Bush the Jr.’s mixed metaphoric rawhide hands
Balled to whip terrorism in a
Saturday afternoon Silver Spoon Saloon brawl or
Fought with two fisted pistollos
Smoking the desperadoes outa’ their caves or
Gunning them down Dead or Alive
At the Dubya B Corral or as proclaimed,
Dressed in Christiandom’s Red Crossed Armor,
George the Second
Will lead the Crusade,
Swiping off Barbarian heads with a
Wild Silver winged swords as the town folk cheer
Falwellian-Lindbaughesque rants of
“Homos, Fags, Lesbos, Liberals, Peaceniks,
Baby Murderers, Commies, Towel Heads,
Foreigners! Repent or die.”
As I heard someone on Wall Street or
In Washington say, “Oil is gold,”
I could hear background heavy shovels
Digging in the ash and rubble Of Wall Street
As the conniving conspire in hallowed halls to send
Drilling rigs over the virgin tundra for Alaskan gold
To feed the monstrous machines
Of petroleum profit.
Then came the distinct stomping feet of
The hundreds of thousands of speech Police carrying
White crosses salvaged from the march to Pretoria
Bearing down upon us.
As I thought:
If the nations of Reborn Islam are as
The new ‘Yellow Peril’ of Hearst-speak,
The “Evil Empire” of Reagan-Speak,
Would not the Hero-Patriot Judas Iscarriot be,
Bribed as our new antiterrorist recruits shall be,
And the Terrorists, Jesus and his Cell of Twelve be?
Allowing of course, for the striking similarity
Between Jesus the Palestinian Jew
And Arafat the Palestinian Arab …
More than Jeffrey Hunter,
The blue eyed Caucasian
Matinee idol be.
As I mused,
Out of the corporate video box came
The picture of a National mourning
As the governing body gathered
In prayer and angst and
A radio in Blazin Bill’s redneck BRBQ
Broadcast a twangy white siren song of
Salvation found in Amazing Grace
That snaked its way around
The rocker of this democratic cradle.
Against that background came
The clicking of the multi-million Khaki panted,
Denim shirt and silk tied corporate keyboard clones
Rewriting this past even as the bulldozers uncovered
The broken and dismembered dead.
The sound entwined with backhoes
Gouging out a deep burial hole
For those of us who dissent as
The Right White Christians Soldiers
Go Marching As To War,
Gathering at the corners of Main Street and Broad
Where I can see the fluttering of Old Glory
From myriad automobiles go bye.
But the Stars are gone and white crosses lean
With the weight of a new strange fruit as
The Battle Hymn of the Republic continues sung
In national ceremony and
The pickups pull in and out of daily Jobs,
Fed X runs its coomon routes and
Joe and Joan earn their next Yankee dollar as
An ad for an all new, all white cleansing cream
Interrupts in which Ms. America promises it will do
What Ellis Island failed to do as
We are segued-wayed to
The returning Network news:
“We now go to Connie or Ted or Pat or
Bill or Raoul or Mee Ling at ‘Ground Zero’ or,
“Back to you Dan,” who has lost his youth
And his memories of being beaten down
To Daley’s floor In Chicago and
In the park across the Street and
In the rice paddies of Indochina and
Just down the street in the courtroom
Where freedom was bound, gagged and
Found guilty …
As in solemn hymn America continues to
Twirl in a Dance Of death begun in a
Plaza in Dallas, on a bloody Floor in LA,
On a balcony in Memphis, a ballroom in Harlem,
And in murders in offices of black protest in
Every city in the nation
For which no gavel ever rang.
In loss I remember the report of
Another fiery burning exploding death,
“Oh the humanity,” the very human reporter cried,
Anguished as any person could be,
As the fire burst into death in the Hindenburg.
And I realize that the new squeaky clean astringent
Is being used to clean more than our complexions,
And the new strange fruit hanging from the alabaster
Crosses will be us.
Part II
I remember when we fished and
Swam in clear and flowing rivers
Under sweet and painless rain and a
Falling snow of unlittered white.
We hunted and grew our food and
Children with mothers and sisters
Who lent guidance to our ways.
No more of less pure in our thoughts and
Wars with our neighbor nations,
We yet lived more in harmony
With our two legged friends and foes and
Among the Deer, the Eagle, Fox and Crow.
We ate or wore what we killed and
Only killed what we needed or
That which threatened us,
Until the Europeans came.
To the South amongst the Caribs
Those of Spain and France
Cut off our lips and noses;
Hung us like jerky and burned us alive,
Raped and enslaved our women and children,
As they chanted prayers to their God
Of Human Blood and flesh.
To the East the pinched white faced
British ones in drab black came.
They ate our turkey and cranberries,
Roasted our corn and learned our ways
That they would survive while they defamed
Our beliefs, our culture and
Bred diseases amongst us like
Maggots in wounds and took our land and
Drove us to war against our brothers and sisters.
In our majestic smoking mountains nation
We spoke and wrote our tongue;
Signed our names and
Guided our lives by voice and vote.
They came as farmers and friends and
Could often do no more than mark their X.
Then as they now say 'Oil,'
Someone shouted 'Gold' and
They herded us like livestock,
Hunted us down like the wild wolf and
Drove us on a Trail of Tears
A thousand miles long as we died
Thousands and thousands more.
There were no boxcars for us to ride:
We died step by step, child by child,
Parent by grandparent, tear by tear,
Until we were abandoned for a
Soulless life in the flat void of Oklahoma.
In the West they brought The Great Whooping Cough and
The Pox, a terror that invaded our homes.
It came on their breaths and in the woolen blankets
Given us for warmth now that they had
Massacred the Buffalo.
They came brandishing their
Silver Custer Swords and
Iron cannon and locomotive and
Shaking their black leather covered Jesus words
Like a slithering swarm of pale faced snakes,
Twin tongues wagging about the peace
Of a New Paradise while spitting out
The names Geronimo, Nathez Pierce, Sitting Bull
With the same blood wet spittle curses of
'Savage,' 'Heathen,' 'Devil,' 'Evil Ones' while
Singing their prayers to Mary, Joseph and Paul,
The missionary Baptist.
In the end our free spirits were caged.
We stumbled in alcoholic searches
For an escape from corner post to corner post
In the invisible barbed wire concentration camps
They called reservations.
And today their sons and daughters
Dare use the term terror
As If it were newly created
To be used against them.
Part III
There have been times in these last weeks when I felt like crying or
like an American dying.
When I heard them say, "we knew," tears formed and dropped onto my outstretched
hands.
I asked, "who knew?"
Jorge at the garage?
Jane at the bank?
Keisha at the Red Roof Inn or in telemarketing or as Director of Sales?
Or, Zack on his bike messengering down Wall Street when the windows blew
as a glass storm?
Juan, Omar, Yvette who were cleaning floors, doing maintenance, or
washing
windows in The Towers?
Or Mary Lou at the Waffle house?
Good Ole Billie counting cans of
Campbell soups in Kmart?
Did they all know?
And then I asked, "just who the fuck are they?"
The million dollar Senators? Multi thousand dollar Congresspeople?
The
CIA? FBI? NSC? The Joint Chiefs of Staff? The Multi Media?
The COO-CEO-CFO-CIO's of International Corporate Capital whose
profits
and loss, go up and down like the flow of human blood pressure, dependent
upon the exploitation of resources and stability in the 3rd world,
Did they all know?
And George I and II? And Dick and Donald and Colin and Condoleeza.
I'll bet they knew.
We pay them to know.
They were told, we are told, by myriad experts, committee reports,
not
to mention our errant Middle Eastern stepchild Israel.
I
know they knew.
But most importantly, I knew.
I had hid my head. Put my mind to sleep. Dove beneath the obvious
surface
of River Denial and the illusion of conspicuous consumption. I surfaced
a moment when terrorist blew out the Tower basement, went back under when
there was a verdict, rid of the problem. I vomited at Oklahoma, but they
told us that they had quickly captured and killed the crewcut, lone perpetrator
and jailed his bespectacled helper. Then they said they were just two or
three disparate, lonely Right white Men who succumbed to the stress. It
must have been the stress of being White in a world of multicolor. But
I knew then when the first one they arrested was of Arabic origin and not
one crew cut blonde blue eyed profile hit the evening news.
And I knew that there was sometihing terribly wrong when the Media profiled
neverending White faces dressed in camoulflage armed with murder weapons
hiding under the Congress protected wing of the NRA who offered sympathy
for the ‘cause,’ if not the act.
I didn't want to know. I wanted to pretend: With sometimes Liberal Bill
in office, Jessie visiting the White House, Women in power, A Black Caucus
in position, no apparent unjust war being waged by US military. I thought
I could live my days in a laissez faire reverie of Post World War II melancholic
ballads; In a kind of cultural absenteeism from the consequences of America,
the Corporate State.
But I knew.
For worse yet, I had attempted membership in the Newest phase of the Corporate
Community --- the Dot Com culture of Hip khaki-denim-tassle loafer wearing ---
X Programmers --- multi million dollar possibilities at the end of a clicking
Microsoft mouse: When successful we would all Leverage ourselves to be
Eco-hipper, slicker, cooler Billie Gates.
The reality is that round pegs do not fit in square cubicles. The ears
of wild boars never make a silk purse. Inappropriate ex-revolutionaries
with far-flung attitudes and a dangerous taste for the Real do not an ascending
corporate liar make.
But I knew. All along I knew. And for me there is a little less leniency,
for I knew all the better than most:
I knew when I heard about slavery in the Sudan, Israel's tanks again in
the Gaza, and that American troops remained stationed in Saudi Arabia.
I knew when Cuba continued to be embargoed long after the Red Wall fell
and Nixon's embrace of Chou En Lai carried on over the death after death
In Tennimen Square and the millions of imprisoned slave laborers began
to make our socks and hats and cutest toys and Coca-Cola replaced Opium
and Mao as the opiate of the masses.
I knew when the victory in Grenada became more than Reagan's last feeble
White erection. I knew when they said the Great Republican Communicator
brought down the Evil Red Empire when all of us know that the Democrat,
Atom Bomb Harry, began the war against Communist Russia and Slick Willie's
hero from Camelot ended it in the Gulf Stream. I knew.
I knew when way back when I heard CIA George The 1st lie about the assassination
of Kennedy and over and over about the sale of guns to the Right Wing Contra
Death Squads, (his failed, Cuban Freedom Fighting Surrogates,) as Ollie
North paraded his murder medals with impunity before the Congress and the
semi-stupored news watching eyes of a near dead American electorate.
I knew when they named that fortress building after J. Edgar and never
revealed his knowledge of the Kennedy assassination.
I knew when we reached three million under the restraint of incarceration
paid for by billions spent on the War Against Drugs financed by taxes on
the rivers of liquid alcohol poison and coughing, hacking, carcinogenic
tobacco killing more people than auto accidents.
I knew when we refused to pass mandatory health care for poor kids, moved
millions of jobs to Mexico and Indonesia while the governments of Bush
and Clinton poured more and more tax dollars into the coffers of the despots
who ruled the poor of those nations. While the new Corporate Escorts demanded
more and more tax breaks for the Corporate State and boostered more and
more arms sales for nations to mass murder their own.
I knew when they began resuscitating the Viet Nam War a just war as Cheney's
Halburton's Brown and Root continued to pave over the graves of unknown
millions of dead Southeast Asians.
I knew when we continued to salute the Alamo while hunting down Mexicans
who crossed the Rio to work in their homeland like wild Texas Hares skittering
across George II's ranch; When every October 8th this nation celebrates
the inauguration of genocide against our national forebearers under Mafia
sponsored Italian banners.
I knew when Presidente Fox became Dubya's newest best friend as he rode
the Texas-Mexican oil stream paid for by George the 1st's vast oil riches.
That is until KGB Putin, ex-best peer friend of George The 1st's became
his newest best friend as the two patted each other and another round of
Hell descended upon Chechnya's one time desire to be free of Ronnie's Evil
Empire.
I knew. Did you know?
Did you lift your head from the day-to-day while at the gas pump and ask
yourself and the world: "What price a gallon of gas? A quart of oil?"
The price of murder and repression of countless minds and bodies in Saudi
Arabia and Egypt, Sudan, Indonesia all allies and protectors of the Great
Black God, Oil?
Or is it the tens of thousands of children dying in Iraq as Sadam eats
like a Sheik?
Or did you think: Is it coincidence that George and Dick rode the slick
waves of petroleum through the double-dealing doors of Congress and onto
the green-back-dollar carpet into the White House?
That even the Big Stick Imperialist Teddy Roosevelt loved this land enough
to save it while his heir apparent Dubya wishes to plunder the Tundra because
its cheaper than R&D; in pursuit of new energy sources?
Is it worth the bodies of humans egregiously cremated in the three buildings
and four planes; those that will soon die in the desert wilderness over
the burned bones of their Imperialist, Soviet predecessors?
Is it a Social Security fund which is now an empty vault as they wished?
That the feather down pillow of the National Budget Surplus is spewing
out the exhausts of jets, helicopters and the Navy's ocean going vessels?
Is it the price recession and the once again consolidation of wealth by
the wealthy few and lower wages and non-existent unions to battle for many
wage earners? Is that enough of a price?
Is it worth the dead and sick civilians and postal workers? What price
a gallon of gasoline?
Listen: I know its not easy to wake at five or six or seven in the morning,
get started, get the kids up and dressed and fed and remember to have their
homework and out the door and somehow safely to school while we flee like
scuttling rats to our underpaid employment niches and either like our jobs
and our co-workers or don't, in safe or unsafe conditions, working for
bosses who care or don't or cant and do it every day with or without adequate
health care or savings upon which to retire, and drive endlessly in insane
traffic paying tax after tax at every stop along the long rode to school
or home or day care to an empty or hate filled or boring or alcoholic or
illness anchored home and never have a moment to sit and think or rest
before getting the kids to do their homework, or knowing where the hell
they are, or finding them to a doctor who will take Medicaid because you
cant afford the insane cost of corporate insurance for them, or caring
for a mother or father because there is never enough money or the promised
tax breaks for medication for the elderly, and finally getting the stuff
out of the refrigerator for dinner, if it is not frozen out of the box
into the last newest K-Mart or Walmart microwave oven and onto the table
while trying to listen or watch some overpaid, semi-literate, brainwashed
capped toothed coifed local blither-smiling know-nothing new anchor, or
Network authoritative, cosmetically perfect anchor celebrity who earns
only a little less than the lying politician whose squirming ass he or
she is kissing at the moment, tell you just enough of the lies fed to them
or their near sycophantic ‘correspondent’ who never asks that poignant
last question that might nail the answer or prove the man or woman to be
the liar they are, but takes in and delivers the news from the latest Corporate
State Info Department to either make you mad or feel secure or terrified
or to where you just don't care any more as the baby screams, and he or
she gets another drink instead of helping with your black hair dyed, black
circle eyed, cigarette chain smoking multi pierced teenager who just cant
get it either and is screaming that he or she hates you and wishes that
you or he or she was dead and may at anytime try suicide or heroin or Ectasy
or help conceive an unwanted pregnancy because sex education and birth
control are taboo.
I know. You have only the illusion of control. You are terrifed that at
any minute you will open the mail and be enveloped in some irate 3rd Worlder's
mad plot to poison an American, any American, because the only God he knows
speaks through a Zealot paranoid version of whatever Tome is at hand at
this time in history or he cant get the despots out of his own country
without fearing the eternal White God Wrath of every president since Abraham
Lincoln and the invention of the petroleum fueled engine.
And I know that we want to believe that this is the Greatest Country on
Earth; that this nation is the greatest experiment in individual democracy
despite of all the obstacles the Owners and the froth mouthed, penis wagging
War Mongers have thrown before us.
I know too that we are overwhelmed; that we often want succumb to the notion
that if we can just maintain, just maintain our control of It, and the
This and That, that either the Golden Elixir of Well Being or illusion
enough will Trickle Down as Uncle Ronnie promised from the Golden at the
top and into our ravenous mouths so that there is just enough to take the
Edge off so we will not rush out to sedate ourselves into conscious walking
death with the latest TV advertised pharmaceutical panacea, and thus, we
will not lose it and go running wild into the streets, screaming
‘Off With Their Heads,’ wielding kitchen knives and stirring spoons and
lug wrenches and art class scissors as weapons, or like TV copy cats, visit
one last McDonald's or Pep Boys or our former places of employment with
the latest Right Wing approved, government licensed ,vast fast body penetrating
automated murder weapon, and kill kill kill as many of ourselves as possible
before we get the hired black suited assassans of the state to kill kill
kill us. I know. It is not easy.
For in truth, our self satisfying America of the 1980's, '90's and New
Millennium has come to no more care about a starving Iraqi, Afghanistan,
Sudanese, or Guatemalan or Palestinian child than it does about a malnourished,
hungry African-American baby in Detroit, a Hispanic child in East LA, or
the Native American child on a Wyoming Reservation unless one of ours be
one of them.
The only difference is that Middle Eastern child's body falls into the
billowing dust storm covering an oil rich land.
Our White appearing or wanna-be, would be class ascending people do not
see themselves outside the immediacy of their material consuming, electronic
culturally inundated lives.
Until September the 11th, most Americans thought Afghanistan was a Afghan
throw used to ward off the chill while reclining on our couches in front
of their favorite sitcom or Emmy award winning dramas starring the latest
lies about urban racial relations.
American beneficiaries of the Great Trickle Down noblesse oblige think
they are the 'regular' people as I heard a wealthy white ten year old repeat
the lie about himself. Their history is a Hollywood movie; a sanitized,
pasteurized, Corporatized sitcom with laugh track, or melodrama where all
the colors blend into a pallid, tasteless, painless pastel.
In truth and contrary to cuisine protocol and aesthetic, White America
is a mound of white rice on the thick blanket of black and brown beans
of the world.
I thank God that as I watched the video images of the farmers of Afghanistan
work their day behind the plow, with a shovel made from a shaved tree limb,
pull a bucket from the well hand over hand, I could remember my past:
My redneck uncle plowing a field behind a Georgia mule, his coon dogs baying
for a run; slopping the pigs and milking a cow; an outhouse we walked to
in the cold of the winter and not so funny jokes about the use of corn
cobs; a cold metal hand pumped well providing the only running water in
the house.
In truth we are only a half-century, a generation and two atom bombs removed
from Ahmed and his family in the field.
And I know, as we have the right and duty to pursue the criminals of this
New War, that is being packaged like the New Car, the New House, the New
Wardrobe, the New Attitude, the New Life, the New Physique, the New Kitchen
Faucet Infomercial, that the course of US foreign policy has not and will
not be changed so long as we know, or do not know, and do nothing.
And I know too that the military action in this New War is tied to that
same corrupt corporate serving Foreign Policy and is doomed like its predcessor
in Viet Nam as surely as Russian Imperialism was before it.
That the Corporate state that protects their Third World despots will use
up the lives and blood of our neighbors, friends and relatives in this
hot pursuit, unless we learn and do something.
To the Corporate State the message is their oft repeated mantra:
‘It’s nothing personal, it is business.’
As it was for Mercedes-Benz, Krupp, Farbin to WWII Germany; Dow’s Agent
Orange in South East Asia; Mobile, Exxon, Texaco, British Petroleum in
every oil rich sector of the Third Word. As they say to those of us who
have been laid off or lost our jobs; the same they say to every veteran
since WWII.
Were I paranoid I would reflect upon Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin.
There is historical precedent to boost a depressed economy and to control
the public consciousness: Roosevelt's provocations of Japan and Germany
leading to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the amassing of great civic
consensus which correspondingly led to the de-energizing of the mass movement
around the failure of the New Deal and the movement towards some form of
Social Democracy.
Then there was LBJ's use of the prefabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident which
killed the War on Poverty and launched a wave of police terror against
the African American dissident population while he further prosecuted the
war in South East Asia until US forces were deprived of victory and until
peace was obtained when Kissinger threatened North Viet Nam with nuclear
war if Hanoi did not come back to the peace table.
I know all this.
And I know that this promised four year in duration Special Terrorist Bill
that devastates our Bill of Rights has the wings of the steel Eagle mounted
over Hitler’s bunker and has been hiding in the white cloaked closet of
every Right Wing fanatic in the Republican Party with the blessings of
their nearest incestuous relatives, the entire Democratic Party wing of
the Corporate Party which today RULES.
And I know that those who oppose the thundering greed and power of this
State and who become powerful become dead.
Lincoln - Kennedy - King - Kennedy - Malcolm X … come to mind.
But we will all die one day: The Bushes, the Clintons, and the Powells
and their Upper Class Board of Directors, ad infinitum.
Paradise and a flock of virgins aside, it is how we live, not that we die
or how we die, that matters. For all we have, as human beings, is life
and the things we do during it.
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