if the irony weren't
dripping from a bloodbath,
one could almost laugh
at the Times and the Post,
and the rest of the right flanks
in the establishment's stables,
lined up like so many
conscience-less zombies,
their collective karma
in an overwhelmed coma,
more dead than their millions
of abetted brown corpses,
their 'free speech' banners
as hollow as Trump Tweets,
the burden of their collusion
haunting the fetid breezes
where Democracy might
have actually rung.
**** * * **** * * ****
- Evan Hawthorn, the 25th of May, 2017
when compared to the astonishingly consistent,
hundred percent subservience
to the Machiavellian wishes of Israel and Saudi Arabia,
evinced in the election-resistant
slightness of light
between the establishment's firmament
of right and righter parties
(notwithstanding those bulging curtains
and shuffling sandals that loom in the 9-11 mists),
Russia's unprecedented,
heinous and nefarious, Godzilla-rearing influence
must be a preternatural thing indeed.
going only by the sold out crowds
for the resurrected re-ascendance
of nationalism and patriotism,
by the strange sightings of McCarthy's ghost,
lurking with his war profiteer bedfellows
at the head of the goose-stepping ranks
of the Party that isn't Democratic,
joined at the hip as they suddenly are
to "Democracy's friends" at the CIA,
spontaneously sprouting from neoliberal pods
as a redefined species
of born again regime changers,
speaking in their suspicious,
fifties tongues,
just loud enough to be heard
by the listening devices
their souped up cell phones
so willingly surrendered
to one of their folksy own,
sounding on their righteous trumpets
a clarion call for the
infotainment freedom of regurgitated speech,
while sharpening pikes for the heads of Wikileaks
and shading the right sides of elephants' hides,
brandishing their subscriptions
to the woefully persecuted
John the Baptist scribes and channellers,
those Prepare-Ye-the-Way-of-War serial criminals
at the Times and the Post,
this inconclusive, and stubbornly
elusive influence,
thinly veiled and eagerly,
unanimously assailed,
would have to be a sort of
hitherto unimagined dark matter,
a reverse-acting, negative-exposing,
history-and-reality-reinventing,
circumspection-circumventing,
menacingly-clever-yet-obtusely-clueless,
conveniently-refocusing,
repackaging and recriminating,
self-inflicting-with-demonization
type of 'influence',
equipped with a malice
uncannily similar to our manifestly predestined,
projected intentions.
those very same, never questioned,
mythic intentions
we're forever hearing all those accolades about,
that are in fact the stock and trade
of every American politician,
and form a kind of religion
in and of themselves,
prompting us
(and oddly, no one else but us)
to surround other people's countries,
especially the independent ones,
with eight hundred state of the art
military bases.
those very same, ever so profitable intentions
that naturally allow us to excuse ourselves
whenever we happen to murder
a noticeable number of "other" people,
which happens whenever an angel rings a bell
and the stocks go up.
the sputtering, Democracy-splattering intentions
that gushed from a string
of proudly appraising presidents
who eyed Cuba as the "jewel" in their "necklace",
glinting with promised riches
in their gated and whitewashed
Latin American "backyard".
the beacon-beaming, exemplary intentions
that the peasants and pack animals
in Southeast Asia
are still reeling from,
and so many refugees are trying to escape.
the "good" intentions that are buried
with the "bad" Indians' freedom.
unfailingly masked by the
pornographic fiction of colluding Hollywood,
and the dependable deflection
of our directionly disabled, looking glass media.
and yet
as if to prove our legendary lawlessness
and our stunning dearth
of sentient, functioning journalists,
they are brazenly flaunted
in the bedazzling light of 'America's day'
in Bill Clinton's celebrated
declaration of piracy
and the Sainted Obama's smooth assertion
that "full spectrum dominance"
is the "overriding goal"
of our "exceptionally indispensable"
foreign policy.
meanwhile,
i expect the uniformly reputed rarefied niche
of Simon Bar Sinister's
retroactively ricocheting, reasonless influence
will one day be explained.
it's the sort of thing one might hope to find
in the special features of a Doctor Who DVD.
perhaps in that lost episode
where he stumbles over
the invisible weapons of mass destruction
and ends up accidentally
spreading Democracy™.
** **** * **** *** **** * **** **
- Evan Hawthorn, the 22nd of May, 2017
the relief that our left bank colonial flank
is safe in the reassuring arms
of "Centrist Neoliberalism"
echoes like the quaking knell
still hemorrhaging
for our substance-less "Democracy".
it washes up in trending waves,
raising the death-rattle spectre
of Jacob Marley's chains,
resounding with the reflectionless ring
of emotional appeals,
like the congregational tide of shocked indignation
which is itself,
in its with-us-or-against-us
relentless resistance
(to undoctored history),
and blithe indifference
to the dauntless dearth of choice,
the very essence
of the unnoticed absence.
this haunting is made complete
with the myopic visitation
of Fascist unwanted posters
summoned by the unholy communion
of donkeys, profiteers, assassins and spies,
unfurling from virtual woodwork
in a focus-stroking shell game,
much like the "Democrats" themselves,
or journalism's jugglers,
hooked with green IVs
to the Powers that Own.
for they dish out many isms,
and before enamoured eyes
installed the creaking floorboards
beneath the bulging, bloated clown,
that deftly played distraction
who could hardly accomplish,
left to his own narcissistic devices
this decades-long descent,
let alone the perfectly executed
Ayn Rand Strangelove's
homeopathic cabinet
of all-consuming decapitation.
the Bully in Chief,
that one-man travelling brand,
the bleached whale poster child
of Wee Willy Syndrome,
is opportunity's opportunist,
incapable of creating anything,
leering from lurid curtains
when times and rubes ripen.
the biggest baddest wolf
at the Protection Racket's revolving door.
the demon head on the flipping, counterfeit coin,
bedazzling the preening flock
of endangered, lopsided, ill-informed eagles,
pinioned by their surplus
of righteous right wings.
like the slickly conflicted corporate menus
the demented beacon's atrophied citizens
and reassigned consumers are saddled with,
the French electoral circus
doesn't furnish off ramps
from the lockstep, bipartisan,
rapaciously exceptional,
paved with rampant "interests"
and "inessential" corpses,
24-7, highway to hell.
**** * * **** * * ****
- Evan Hawthorn, the 11th of May, 2017
