Regarding the Poems--And the Fate of Humanity

 

I may not be posting poems for a while.  I am busy grading a huge stack of virtual papers.  Just as importantly, I am stung to my core by the upcoming election, one that will determine if America loses its republic to a fascist dictatorship under the most disgusting human being I myself have ever encountered in a public figure within my country.   

What’s most disturbing to me, even more than his conviction on felonies, is that Donald Trump has been found liable for rape in a court of law twice and, as well, dozens of women have credibly accused him of sexual assault.  I will leave aside the many other reviling aspects of this racist, sexist malignant narcissist, who has wallowed in greed and fraud all his life; otherwise, I could write all night.  I will instead conclude with the most heartbreaking aspect of all of it:   despite his crimes, sins and unrepentant hate and demagoguery, his psychopathic lack of conscience, his bankruptcies both financial and moral, even so, despite all this, and despite overwhelming documentation disproving his big lies, such as that the 2020 election was stolen, about half the population of the United States, millions of people, even after ten years of exposure to the chaos--to his dysfunction, abuse and incessant spew of lies--are still going to vote for him.

The perpetual question I hear, and many of us hear, is why?  Why are so many people going for Trump?

Kamala Harris is obviously highly competent, whereas Trump is obviously incompetent, even leaving aside his disgusting, wretched disordered soul.  Many of his followers, in fact, say they don’t like him as a person; and yet are going to vote for him anyway.  What is going on?

 

My answer, which I have expressed on this blog before, is this:  White Protestant heteronormative patriarchy has always ruled this country.  A change would be as dificult as it would be profound.  It would be an historic, even epochal, accomplishment. 

Trump is the spearhead of the longstanding entitlement of Whiteness to keep the throne--and so many people want this, want Whiteness to reign, that it doesn’t matter that Trump is a grossly wicked, egregeiously unfair man, or that he is incapable of sane management.  Indeed, he has been professional diagnosed by numerous psychologists, who have written a best-selling anthology titled, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump."

Isabel Wilkerson explains the situation with far more clarity, detail and insight than me.  Wilkerson does so in her book, “Caste:  The Origins of our Discontents.”

 

Here’s how a New York Times book reviewer started off his review of it:

 

A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off. 

I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.

I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/books/review-caste-isabel-wilkerson-origins-of-our-discontents.html

 

In short, according to Wilkerson, America has been saddled with a caste system ever since its earliest roots, going back to the revelations of the 1619 Project.  Kamala Harris represents the decline of our traditional caste system.  Trump is its continuation and fortification.  Trump takes the hate and rage of the caste system’s racism, sexism, homophobia and other oppressions and turns them loose on those who would challenge the old ways. 

 

Trump is attempting to do what the White-ruled system has always done:  shut down protest with fear, terror and the threat of violence.  Once he gets full power, he will use actual violence, and so will his followers across the country, down to the smallest town and village.  In my tiny town of 1000 population, there are a number of Trumpers who are filled with rage, stoked by Trump’s words, and who own assault rifles, these being easy to purchase in the USA.

 

Wilkerson says that people support Trump--support the caste system--because they see it as being in their own selfish best interest.  Mostly, these are White people, and mostly White males within that group, that is, the males who are at the very top of the caste structure.   Black and brown people who support Trump do so because, like everywhere in the world and throughout history, some people in oppressed groups will serve the ruling class dutifully to get ahead, even and perhaps especially by turning on their own.  Turning on your own is required and rewarded by a segregated slot in the hierarchy. 

So, America is at a crossroads.  One of Trump’s slogans is “Bring American Back.”  One of Harris’s slogans is, “Not Going Back.” 

Because America is still by far the strongest country, both militarily and economically, the result of the upcoming election will tilt the whole world--toward either fascism under Trump, or democracy under Harris.

I’ve argued many times on this blog that rulership by a cult-charisma dictator is an ancient, primitive form of governance.  Its essence is nothing but 'might makes right.'  

Democracy, on the other hand, is an advanced form of ethics technology.  Democracy embraces the concepts of humanism--equality, human rights and rational decision-making--to advance the pursuit of happiness for everyone. 

If Trump wins, the world will slide toward cult-charisma dictatorship even more that it already has, and the result will be a primitive global standard of government, one that is centered in the irrational chest-thumping of a few insecure males. 

If Harris wins, the world has a serious chance of advancing its overall ethics technology.  This is critical, because without advanced ethics tech, humanity will not have the maturity to properly manage its other advancing techs, such as weapons, robots, and AI.

Again, either we evolve our collective conscience--by advancing our ethics tech--or we perish under the rule of petty tyrants. 

I believe everything--not just for America, but for the entire human world--rests on this election.  We will either be ruled by ignorance, or by reason. 

Trump, indeed, denies that global warming even exists.  The vast body of scientific evidence, and the climate change happening right before our very eyes, the mutating of the continents and the oceans, mean nothing to Trump, simply because they conflict with what he arrogantly opines.   He sees himself as a god.   A messiah.  And he has surrounded himself by those who will fawn before his fake omniscience, a retinue of lickspittles who will tell him that he is always right, always wearing the emperor’s new clothes.

I personally believe that it will be very hard for Harris to win.  She is up against the White male caste system that has existed for hundreds of years.  It is also fair to say, given the seamlessness of misogyny, that she is up against 12,000 years of patriarchy.  Harris, if she wins, will be the strongest person in the world.  A woman.  A non-White woman.  And she will not be a placeholder for patriarchy, as were the sprinkle of women in the past who ruled over various city and nation states.  It’s not as if Elizabeth or Cleopatra worked in great portion, if they did at all, to advance women’s rights.

Harris and everyone behind her is up against patriarchy.  And the cruelty of patriarchy has always been at the top.  It has never ruled with logic, or with fairness.  But instead with a fist. 

Still, Harris might win.  And what a fantastic victory that would be.  Not only for the Democratic Party, but for people everywhere, in every country across our barbaric, wretched, struggling yet hopeful, naturally wondrous globe. 

It won’t be a final victory, not by any means.  The battle to advance the collective human consciousness will go on.  However, if Trump wins, I believe we will be stuck with patriarchy and all its ignorance and cruelty until the end of civilization.  I predict that this end will come fairly soon, probably within decades.  We’re on track for WWIII, after all, with startling similarities to Europe in the 1930s.  Putin invading Ukraine.  China eyeing Taiwan.  Israel expanding a war in the middle east, while committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.

'Never Again,' the motto meant to ward us from another Holocaust, has fallen before Netanyahu's genocidal appeal to 1 Samuel 15:3, where the Amalekites are not only slain, down to the last woman and child, but also their animals slaughtered and lands salted.

Yes, we hover on the edge of the end.  Full war.  Full Fascism.  But there is still a flicker of candlelight in the dark.  A hope that we can walk out of this underworld labyrinth and find our way, eventually, onto a full-bodied path of light.

I hope and pray to the Angels.  The Angels, as I see them, are non-religious.  The Good transcends any one religion.  Religions are simply different mythic routes to approach the Good, but must be shorn of the biases and dysfunctions which lead their adherents astray.  There are Angels for all of us.  Good beings, somewhere, even if only in our minds, beyond us.  Call them by some other name, if you wish.  The Good is real.  If Evil is real, and it is, for we can all see it in the crystallized, maximized hate of ethno-nationalist political movements, then so is the Good.  And so, too, are Angels, at least as I have framed them.

We can as a species approach the Good together, down a reasonable, loving path.  But  we must dare to embrace the truth of equality, a simple truth underscored so long ago in that immortal statement:  Do to others as you would have them do to you.

I pray for all of us.  I pray to the Angels.  I pray for all of human fate.  This is a turning point for Civilization, one way or the other. 

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11/1 ... eds

Poem: Wind Ode

 

Wind Ode

 

listen to the wind,

a festival of hugs

defying loneliness,

calming and stroking,

 

listen

as it shatters and unshatters,

an ethereal liquid sculptor

never to die, always regenerate,

 

to uphold the sky and spill it,

to moan and pray,

sacred and as well

effulgent and sexual.

 

the wind is always an embryo

rushing toward the faintest hints

of the most venerable

understanding.

 

art and soul,

the clues are in the wind,

flirting and somersaulting,

answering

 

what we crave to know, 

the wind, incantata,

a bard beyond words,

a mirror of what is.

 

 

===========================

10/23 ... changed last stanza and a line above
spellbinding

Poem: Old Tree

 

Old Tree

 

i want to hug you,

shimmy up your shorn smooth sheath,

past branches gone as cobwebs,

the knotholes a cuneiform

whose bruises inlay my chest,

so when i descend

every lesson of weather,

every breath and teardrop

known to the sky,

goes with me.

 

====================

10/20 ... "goes" replaces "comes"

Exhausted.  Praying that fascism doesn't win the upcoming election.  The ugly prejudiced violence of a cult of hate.  

Poem: No Santa

 

No Santa

 

while crows funnel

in a cloud of rotten milk and

meat and raucous bickers as

sharp as lacerated bottles and

cans and curses of wing,

a pimpled putrid smell

curdles the notrils of the children

who kick paint cans to fiddle their fingers

under a helter-skelter of ripe diapers and

tinfoil and cardboard-vegetable muck,

children whose forearms delve down deep

in the disgust of flavors of grime,

hunting for a 5¢ prize of fungible plastic,

children who trudge to hunker,

fat black garbage bags on their backs,

and who look not at all like elves

who tote nonexistent toys

for no Santa.

 

==============================

Poem: Pebble

 

Pebble

 

to shout from its minor perch,

to sing with the blaze of

an asteroid leaving outer space,

 

it craves to be heard

and laments the exile

of its admixture.

 

it scolds the quirk of its own honest substance 

with a gall so derided 

it is obsolete in the cities of gravel.

 

it has so much to say.

every fleck on tegument

could be a crease sporting lips.

 

but who will notice

such a cloistered hideaway,

where a nova masquerades as a glint?

 

 

=======================================

10/20 .. changed a word

10/14/24 mods

10/13/24 ... mods to make this mod sound more about the danger of honesty 

Poem: Under the Gun

 

Under the Gun

 

an occasional ant

upgrades the course of the colony’s chores,

lucky to avoid the pluck of a spider.

 

the ant clutches the podium

riding a dice roll that somehow slips

dismemberment by righteous mandibles.

 

once daft and deviant, malign and rampant,

the previous pariah basks in accolades,

inscribed now as a hero in the pheromone codes.

 

atop its servile scurriers,

and the corpse-husks of hated failures,

the new leader legislates,

 

godly over those who are similar, superior even,

except the babble of time

didn’t call their names.

 

 

 

 

=============================

10/14 mods

plays on, "there is nothing new under the sun"

Poem: Kettle

 

 

Kettle 

 

my february-cold face sinks

toward a coil under kettle and water,

a serpent of warm orange

deviantly hot-blooded,

whose industrial mettle

plays young to the cataract stare

of windows glazed by frost.

 

the kettle casts a spell,

encouraged by my quest,

of little emissaries of air

which launch ocular as they plunge upward

toward my fevered gaze.

 

first a few then streams then a

kettleful of eyes which mushroom

in the effervesce, each one

of them a momentarily ogle

devoid of anything at all

except perhaps a hint of innocence.

 

such is the bubble-boil brouhaha,

a frenzied figleaf of drama,

sandwiched between clones

of drywall and ancient pale-lime paint and

those wizened panes of icy squares.

 

on and on

the replenish of little dots

rises in sways of columns,

tucked in a bell-curve of glass.

collectively a specter,

they condense into a blurry patina of steam,

concealing the weave of  tears

on my flushed face.

 

 

======================================

10/9/24 ... renamed poem "Kettle"

Slyia Plath inspired 

The Monster Netanyahu (WaPo article)

The Washington Post has had the guts to publish what the monster Netanyahu has done:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2024/gaza-reconstruction-rebuild-process-plans/

And, yes, Hamas is wicked and evil, too, it should be disbanded.  But Netanyahu is the one who has carried out his dark vision of ethinic cleansing and, as well, genocide, in Gaza.

========================= 

Poem: Downtown Rush

 

Downtown Rush

 

conformity, conformity,

shirt-button pips on dominos.

 

one stray truth could topple

the whole busy sidewalk of oxfords.

 

urbanites, cheeks of micro-knots,

stretch into spurs of a bobbing fence:

 

we are pedestrian cattle, after all,

roped and herded

by internal wires.

 

i try to be lazy

in the bustle of twill and leather.

 

i dare, for just a moment,

to dangle in the crosscurrents,

jostled as a marionette.

 

one dirty human being

curls at the foot of a dumpster.

 

is such the price of wisdom?  

 

is acuity

a bipedal piece of trash?

slovenly and unseen,

crumpled and unkempt?

 

is the vagabond 

a simple guru?

it comes easy, this stereotype, 

a pill to sugarcoat 

our perambulatory denial.

 really, though, it is true,

even a moment out of step

and one's shoes become a nuisance,

wayward in the stress-greed march.

 

 

 

=======================================

12/7/24 ... mods  (impossible to work with ..)

10/27/24 ... mods

10/6 ... mods 

NYC circa 1996

Poem: Doors

 

Doors

 

we weren’t meant

to tango vivid with ghosts,

the gone should not outflesh the day,

nostalgia never never dreamed

to be so concrete.

 

for how fragile we were then,

were we not; and not to witness

is what magnifies this togetherness,

we who once begged to immerse in bliss

and yet now are far less

than a glimpse of that which

was never meant to be.

 

this past of ours

holds much more than canvas or sculpture,

and reaches out as if singing

so many songs without answers

behind the doors.

 

=========================

USA Media abandons Gaza to doom

 Mainstream US media is completely ignoring Gaza now and the genocidal conditions inflicted on them by Israel:

Analysts have identified Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as one of the deadliest and most destructive in recent history. Large areas of Gaza, including critical infrastructure, have been bombed to the ground, with about 63 percent of the total structures in the Gaza Strip estimated to be destroyed, damaged, or possibly damaged. According to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), even if a five-fold increase in construction materials were allowed into Gaza, it would take until 2040 to rebuild completely destroyed housing units. But it could take “approximately 80 years” if reconstruction were to follow the same pattern as after previous escalations.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains abysmal. At a recent press conference, UNICEF Director of Child Nutrition and Development Victor Aguayo estimated that “over 50,000 children suffer from acute malnutrition and need immediate treatment”, before warning of the ongoing risk of famine.

(UN Security Council)

https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/monthly-forecast/2024-10/the-middle-east-including-the-palestinian-question-17.php

2.2 million people in Gaza have been subjected to genocidal conditions by Israel's violence, which at best means a grey area, between genocide and atrocious war crimes that don't quite reach that status.  Now they are going to be forgotten as the war goes into Iran (my prediction).  

The US Empire, supplying weapons and now military support for the expanding Israeli aggression--Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, soon Iran--is showing its Evil side.  

Genocide is what the US empire inflicted on the Native American people in North American in the 17th-19th centuries, and it whitewashed that over (perverse pun intended)  Apparently it will do the same with the genocide in Gaza, gaslighting it into the non-existence of mainstream-media silence.

I cry out to the gods, why did you create a world where might-makes-right, the force of Evil, always seems to win?  And why put us in this position, where might-makes-right, the force of Evil, will damn us all, very soon, it seems, to the fires of WW3?  

I love my country for the progress it has made.  And I hate it just as much for its global wicked cruelties.

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