nigh on twenty years ago, the capital of capital's "freedom" fiefdom
unleashed an unlawful aggression avalanche
in a cruel and unprovoked war-for-profit
against the human beings in Iraq.
and still, rogue "democracy's"
distracted and distressed,
memory hole digressed,
"self" obsessed,
denial rivalled,
tribal bibled
red & blue enablers
crown thine
arrogant and unrepentant
international crime ridden
SuperPower addicted
domination afflicted
profit syphoned
nation hooded
warfare sanctioned
(election immune)
rampant and relentless
cult of control
enfolded
predilections "good."
hundreds of thousands dead,
some two million disabled,
nine million displaced,
countless people tortured,
traumatized,
or otherwise harmed
in ways unseen,
environmental devastation,
thievery, occupation,
and embrace of torture as policy
in a whole cloth pride plied
"exceptional" belied
War FOR and OF Terror;
an entire generation raised solely in only war.
(and thanks to punishing
the brave defenders of Fallujah
with depleted uranium,
a greater proportion
of birth defects seeded
in spreading freedom's
forsaken wake
than the lesser degeneration
of we-make-the-"rules based" disorder
managed to plant
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
combined.)
*
do you honestly believe the stolen "homeland" has values?
(we could grade on a curve, say,
obviously leaving out
the capacity for loving
others as ourselves...)
*
why look, that fellow,
second from the right
in an Abu Ghraib
lineup.
he's had a recent haircut,
i expect.
but,
saints preserve us,
isn't he
the
Son of Man?
*
- Evan Hawthorn, a day after the ides of March, twenty years on







the Mouse that, if this drawing had any intention of approaching an honest reality, the Donkey and the Elephant and a pair of television cameras would square off on two sides of a table, in a rickety coming a cropper rambling house entirely closed off by blindered windows, and out in front, beyond a giant electric fence, we'd find Russia's eloquent bear holding a fancy new ray gun, and China's nonjudgmental Panda adding figures on an abacus and scattering gold coins, next to a bewildered myriad array of tiny curious critters from all the Super Powerless nations in the bandaged Global South, all huddled up in the brittle hope that if that astonishing Panda manages to finish connecting Eurasia with his wonderful new everybody wins silken road under the patiently sophisticated Bear's oh! so determined protection it might just be possible to live in a Multi-Polar world that no one gets to define as their own "backyard" or "global battlefield" as they relentlessly murder millions of living things in just the last couple decades with uncountable bombs, unaccountable drones, and, topping off a right sidling of history/staggering crime spree/blatant deal with the Devil with the spanking new invention of utterly vicious sanctions on anyone who might possibly interfere with the almighty right to profit from might that the "bad guy" thrusts on three dozen still uncoerced nations full of struggling human beings and the "good guy" quietly leaves in place, all the while blathering on about how free and independent and blessed by rampant intervention's Godly intentions they are, because, standing out in the midst of the cracked and rutted heat-struck street, where millions of hungry children are milling, it's awfully hard to see the actual meaningful difference between that self-involved pair of blithely unrepentant bickering mobsters. 