War is a very profitable enterprise requiring immense devotion and technical expertise and something that should be entered into with overwhelming caution for its final product is basically horrific tragedy. The faces shown by the New York Times are gut wrenching. These are young men and women just starting out in life and looking into their eyes is a slam across my face of terrible pain. And these are only the smallest sample of the thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been tossed into the black infinity of death. I cannot help but require some sensible reason for this and perceive none.
WAR
A cheese roll and a coffee cup
To accompany the morning chatter of the radio
Nattering of menaces out of Iraq,
Dull appraisals with Chicken Little qualities
Submissive to the coercive governmental claque.
Propaganda channeled through diverse media,
But, at end, persuaded by convergence to attack.
No attempt to disguise the latent fear
Solidified by vivid transmissions of the event,
The Hollywood catastrophe of collapsing towers
Which lived grotesquely both in fantasy and fact
Revealing the cavern where the nightmare cowers
That its chill tentacles strew across the morning floor
To re-enforce hysteria from governmental powers.
There is no question that the threats are real.
But there is the sense that it is being used.
A tool to shake the ordinary quality of living.
Outright violation of firm civil regulation.
Violence from laws over-unforgiving.
There seems to be a plan in this assault on liberty
Generating counter hysterias , thoughts misgiving.
Aside from this war crisis that turns the nation jittery,
Other surreptitious governmental legislation
Wearing sheepskins of civilian stewardship
Are slyly slipped into a wary system
Judicial nominations engineered to tip
Legalities into abysses of unctuous hypocrisy
Punishing the poor, the sick, the deprived with legal whip.
Foundations are shifting. The epicenter at New York
Has spread its fissures across the continent.
No ground is secure. Rigidities begin to crumble.
Official nonsense corrodes good humane sense.
Outraged appeals are stifled down to a mumble.
This is glory hour for mindless vengeful hate.
No room for reason. It's flagellation time for the humble.
Our callous idiotics are mounting for the thrust
For the destructive contest of stupidities out there.
Soon will bloody body fragments play at circus.
Internal organ parts will somersault in crimson sprays.
Heads and hands and toes will vaporize, a hocus pocus
Of the military, indiscriminate in distributed democracy.
A gift of raging explosions in conflict's insane locus.
And for what cause? Will this horrid exhibition
Be the surgery to cure the total cancer
That has metastasized to penetrate out to the tips
Of every energy that engines our power,
Or is it frustrated fury that screams and grips
The species in a spastic termination
To leave the landscape scattered with silent lips?
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Anthony J. Palik
Steven Bridenbaugh
James M. Emmerling
Man Talk Now
David Biddle
Jeff J.
Salon.com
Comments
R
Thank you Jan. Your words always hit me strong.
Thank you for choosing this topic, Jan, and honoring it with your brilliance. Beautifully written, R.
Buffy
I'm always worried, when such young men as Obama and GW Bush get much power.
I think that American generals are doing really wrong to send young men to die. And those young men in Iraq and in Afghanistan are dying just for criminal cases.
I always wonder, strangely, how many soldiers die virgins? Like, I hope you had the experience of sex before you blew up. It probably has to do with the 76 virgins waiting for suicide virgin bombers.
I don't think "volunteer" is the same word anymore, when applied to American troops, anyway. The military advertises in underserved communities. They thrive on promisie of education while not really telling the whole truth. However, I have a few friends who DID get a great deal on their education by foolishly (according to them) joining up and then being miserable for two or so years. No war, however.
My cousin turned 40 in Iraq. He's a fireman, and a member of the National Guard. He says he'll die before he ever goes back.
"The Hollywood catastrophe of collapsing towers
.......
Revealing the cavern where the nightmare cowers"
Powerful stuff. Your use of words is quite remarkable, I was moved.
Thanks Divorce Bard for sending me here
Your name came up consistently in the "overlooked" blogger post that I put up. I cannot believe that I haven't read you before this. I'm sitting with this poem, and it has made my stomach hurt. Thank you for your words.
What would happen if we just bring our troops home now?
Nothing.
Nothing would change.
Afghanistan isn't a country. It's a collection of tribal areas that only band together to fight alien intruders and, once the aliens go home, they go right back to raiding each others villages, as they have been doing for 5,000 years or so.
The only reason that the Taliban are fighting us is because we are there fighting them.
If we go home, they will simply go back to doing what they have always done.
What many people don't understand is that Islam isn't what motivates the Afghans; its their tribal cultures. Most of the Islamists who popped up in Afghanistan came from someplace else, where they couldn't get away with their fundamentalist bullshit.
The vast majority of Muslims are no more religious, no more dedicated to their religions than the vast majority of Christians.
As we start to draw down our troops from Iraq, we will get an object lesson in the fragility of democracy.
Within five years, whatever democracy we leave behind will be overthrown by the generals, who will go back to business as usual, raping the nation for their own benefit.
The real reason we are in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the Bush administration believed that, by invading those countries, we would defray terrorists attacks against targets in the United States, deflecting them to easier targets of opportunity closer to home.
It was stupid then, and it's stupid now, and anyone who continues these stupid wars for such stupid reasons ( democracy building or deflecting terrorists attacks) is probably too stupid to understand this reasoning.