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As I said in my previous post, at some point prose fails to express what I really feel. And I also begin to observe something that people who have never lived in a dictatorship may be slow to notice: that frank language is actively repressed, that certain truths may not be debated or even mentioned. That is why poetry often flourishes under repressive regimes, where a “secret” language must be used. I see this happening in America… perhaps this is the moment for poetry.
Photo: Giro555 / Flickr.
Thinking over the world, in this summer of 2012, this is what I wrote.
Hanging there like an unpaid bill, this inauspicious summer,
With its hot breath shriveling corn:
Ears that fall to dust.
A summer filled with factories for nesting birds:
Tools absorbed in rust.
While in some godforsaken corner,
From where God is said to hail,
A pimp of others’ agony,
Grooms the panting hounds of hell.
12 Comments
Recommended. Thanks for taking some of the heat for saying no to Israel’s leader’s push for war against Iran. Your courage is to be admired.
Thanks.
Recommended. Well written.
*wow* The Orange Satan sure has a rabid bunch of Zionists…! 8-(
Seaton, read your previous post and The Nation article. Thanks! Although, I don’t think it is accurate to conflate Nietzsche and Wagner on this one. Wagner, yes. Nietzsche, no. :)
Perhaps Israel might do what good infantrymen everywhere have done and frag their crazy officers?
Every time I think US culture has gotten craziest, I see that Israel’s apocalyptic imagination throws trump. In relation to the Holocaust, it seems that Israel has behaved like a beaten child who grows up to be equally abusive. For so many, they respond to the world as the world has responded to them. Imagining oneself to be “the people of eternity” in alignment with the “primal currents of history” is the very essence of the NAZI mythos.
Wow! I don’t read Daily Kos, but so many of those comments are of the rabidly ideological type that one expects on Free Republic. They are ridiculous to the point of being comical. Your patience there, Seaton, is enviable. You are a bigger, wiser man than I.
You know what I think might be a big part of what accounts for the response you got at Daily Kos, Seaton, why most of the commenters didn’t understand what you were saying? It’s the idea of the USA as the promised land, what Emma Lazarus said in the poem you quoted. I don’t think many people believe that anymore (perhaps especially folks who sought salvation in Democrat leaders). And perhaps they are right not to. But if the idea of the US as the promised land for the persecuted misfits or the exploited of the world–from the Puritans to the Irish to the Jews–is believed to be invalid, then those who don’t see the US as Promised Land could only see what you wrote as hurtful, offensive, condescending.
Note the responses you got to your other comments. And yet, nobody said peep about the Lazarus poem. Why? Of course they couldn’t. Because to recognize the sentiment in that poem might challenge their beliefs, might ask them to deal with what upset them, might make them think past a knee jerk reaction to what you were saying and actually hear you past their prejudices Or, if they were self conscious about their beliefs, addressing the poem would give their game away, force them to concede. And ye gods but do ideologues hate that.
Or a tangent: The US as utopia is done, so those inclined to such ideas about human society project their hopes and efforts onto Israel as a “pure” state amid a sea of evil, chaos, declension . . .? What else might account for the defensive fanaticism of folks who aren’t even Zionists? I suspect it was your challenge to the idea of a “people of eternity” and the “primal currents of history” that really pushed the emotional buttons of the commenters. After all, isn’t that what the US was supposed to be about? Scores of formerly lefty NeoCon Jewish intellectuals can’t be wrong.
Hell hath no fury like a utopianist scorned.
OK, one last thought. Unless I missed something, how revealing that nobody at Daily Kos attacked Grossman, whose sentiments you merely embellished. Instead, they tried to shoot the messenger, the first resort of the ideologue.
Thanks for your comments, they are very intelligent and I find them extremely helpful.
BTW I have been banned from Daily Kos. I hope this says more about them than it says about me.
Recommended. Congratulations on getting banned from Kos.
Ye gods! So that blog comes to the defense of its pack of snarling, frothing, tribalist hounds?! Of all the ridiculous comments at Daily Kos, the weirdest was the one that suggested that your article called for the destruction of Israel. Exactly how twisted and blinded by their Articles of Faith does one have to be to read that into what you wrote? And it’s comments like that that Daily Kos decides to support? Well, that tells me all I need to know. Yup, it’s Free Republic by another name.