Archive
08/18/10
Past Glories
For the last two unadulteratedly carefree weeks, I've basked in absolutely happy ignorance, tuning out the news — TV, papers, radio, apparatuses with current-events-gathering apps, Friends with a liberal bent or conservative penchant For preaching to their respective choirs, regardless of my viewpoint,
Which, if for no other reason, is reason enough To take a vacation to Italy, revel in its past glories, Suspend dispensing spitting-into-the-wind opinions, Since nobody wishes to listen, just issue papal bulls, Certain theirs is the Word of God made manifest to sinning mankind.
But now that I've arrived back home, from Rome and Venice, Imbued with the renewed pleasures of that civilized republic, Which rose to prominence (a dominance it retained, for a millennium), Then descended into decadence, desperation, decay, Only to rise again, out of the Dark Ages, into the Renaissance,
I realize that the United States, to which I've grudgingly returned, Is a far, proselytizing, falsely prophesying battle cry From the land of the Grand Canal, the Doge's Palace, the Colisseum; Indeed, it's a manifest-destiny haven for obesity, corruption, and greed, A country founded on the sacrosanct tenets of jingoism and hubris,
Where illiteracy is the preeminent virtue and vice the moral imperative, Where the twenty-four-hour news cycle is tabloid gospel, Where making war is the chief peace-making overture, Where life is death of the spirit, the soul, the Holy Ghost, Where Iraq and Afghanistan are political stupidity's holy grails.
Let me put it this way, finally, if I may and even if I may not: America is so clueless, so full of Day-Glo–green Christmas-goose shit It can't work out of its ass, with an up-shit's-creek paddle, That when Wolf Blitzer clichés "our brave boys" "in harm's way" (Not the 4415 whom Bush/Cheney shocked and awed into infamy)
Are coming home, from Iraq, as of tonight, Leaving merely 50,000 pairs of skeleton-crew boots behind, What he means, between what he says, is that America the Risen Is falling faster than Saddam did, off his scaffold, Faster than Baghdad will, after our "supervisory troops" disappear.
08/18/10
|
|||
|
|||
