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CounterPunch
March 15,
2003
Dusting
Dixie
by HAMMOND GUTHRIE
Dixie hearts
and minds
express the truth out of frame and out time
When their manager and press agent chimed:
What the hell
were you thinking?--
Get out there and apologize!!!
And the dusted
Dixie sheep went
Baa--Baa--Baa all the way home
I am embarrassed
that the President is a Texan
Giving all the good ole hearted Texans a bad name
With his protective shield--his Star and Stripe of America
The President
couldn't care less--not a whit
Avoiding his nation's voice and prayer and scream
Stiffling the echo and resolve of 30 million strong
Voices praying--sceaming
that peace and sanity might prevail -
Yet why should this President care or heed to act upon
These outer-voices, civil-prayers and raging-screams?
These voices
don't represent this President's constituency
These faith-based prayers don't cotton to his standard
These unrelenting screams just don't bring home the Dixie Dust
-
This nation's
President wasn't even elected.
Hammond Guthrie is the author of AsEverWas:
Memoirs of a Beat Survivor. He can be reached at: writenow@spiritone.com
(C) 2003 Hammond Guthrie
Migration From The Desert
By JOSEPH RICHEY
A deep sigh of relief - -
all the animals return:
Marines scurry like sea-turtles back into the waves
The amphibious armored water-buffalo lifts a flap
makes a wide U-turn around Bahrain
Copperheads rattle in their barrels
gliding in a mirage on the back of a semi
Tri-pods splayed on the desert floor
fold up their legs & slip back into canvas
Seahawks touch down on the Strait of Hormuz
to bob & read a magazine in the choppy waters
Crosshairs wobble freely in their socket
The wings of war shut their traps
Sparrow & Phoenix hibernate
again
in the belly of the Stealth
Even the Sidewinders whistle back to Subic Bay
C-5s hum 20* latitude 30 thousand feet
Chit-chat from cock-pits of reconnaissance
The Tomcat still snores in Ord
Seagulls tail the wakes of nuclear vessels
Carriers pull onto the Benguela the Equatorial
then Gulfstream it home
save fuel
A Seabee snaps a Bud
Trident Sub burping jacks & eights all night long
F-18 Hornets flip their lids
& hands wave to the smiling wives
Base brats scampering around the airport
Shake off the fatigues break
out civvies
Long horns blow from mountain peaks
The call: migration
w/ Christmas carols on VOA
"I'll Be Home For Christmas"
revived in sad malls of America
Parched tongued GIs salivate
& smile in lines at Safeway
Wolf-pack journalists seek another angle:
Homecoming
A desert tan, Aladdin's lamp keychains
Saddam Hussein coins
body bags filled w/ Arabian trinkets
Replace the rattle of sabers in The Gulf of clicking
teeth
And on the diplo front, nobody
flinched
Blood boiled, but none spilt
Presidents & Prime Ministers pop olives
into each others' mouths
Negotiation, Capitulation, the Preservation
of their political lives
not that of one Billy Phipps,
Fifth armored infantry division, Athens, GA
Many more unemployed inductees on knees of thanks
Sunday morning before Meet The Press
The desert regains its random
contours
Footprintless sand-powder skis east & west
filling in the foxholes
The Great Sphinx winks
blows an invisible smoke ring
some call prayer
And the satellites & the stars over Bethlehem
twinkle in the air space
For the squadrons are breaking bread
And the animals are back in bed
Joseph Richey directs Selva Editions in Boulder,
Colorado. He worked under poets Allen Ginsberg and Edward Dorn,
both great late 20th century poetic chroniclers and social critics.
His books include: Riding the Big Earth, University of Maine,
National Poetry Foundation, and he is editing Ed Dorn Live: Lectures,
Interviews, and Out-takes with poet Edward Merton Dorn, for the
University of Michigan Press.
Richey has never been awarded an NEA Arts Fellowship, nor will
he until there is major regime change in the United States. He
can be reached at: richey80304@yahoo.com
To Ariel Sharon
(on a Small Item in the New York Times, March 8, 2003)
by SABINA C. BECKER
The great giraffe bows down
his head;
fright killed him and this one, born dead.
A zebra died of tear gas, too,
in Palestine's Qalqilya Zoo.
The taxidermist made a killing.
So did your soldiers, ever willing.
This poem was written in response to Bruce Jackson's "Elegy
for Two
Giraffes and a Zebra"
Sabina C. Becker lives in Cobourg, Ontario, Canada.
She can be reached at: binabecker@sympatico.ca
Against Shock and Awe
By BOB PERELMAN
For Kerry Sherin
We may not have chosen to live
inside Dick Cheney's mind, but we
do.
Wyoming, I read somewhere,
is the safest place in North America.
No tornados, no tsunamis, no
earthquakes, no monsoons, or
floods. No major airport: no big planes crashing in the sleet.
But if living in Wyoming is
so safe, living inside Dick Cheney's mind,
though it was formed there, is not safe at all.
How do you get from Wyoming
to Shock and Awe?
Getting from Love to Hate,
that's easy: Love, Live, Give, Gave,
Gate, Hate.
Love comes before life, and
since newborns don't survive on their
own, life at the beginning involves giving. It has to: breast
milk,
protection, language, diapers made out of whatever, some sort
of
attention before you crawl or walk. Everyone living was given
some of that somehow.
That gets us up to Give. Gave
comes next because giving is tiring.
You give and give and what thanks do you get? Nothing. Or
worse. They think they're entitled; they're madder than ever;
they
sulk in their rooms, they throw rocks.
So much for giving. The next
logical step is to build a gate.
But gates creak at night, they
leak, they break, in fact, gates
concentrate whatever's on either side, they distill hate.
Love, Live, Give, Gave, Gate,
Hate: Q.E.D.
But getting from Wyoming to
Shock and Awe?
"Shock and Awe"?
That's the Pentagon's current battle plan for
Iraq: 300 to 400 cruise missiles the first day (more than in
all of
Desert Storm), 300 to 400 the next, to demolish water, electricity,
communications, buildings, roads, bridges, infrastructure in
general. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before,"
a
Pentagon official told CBS. "There will not be a safe place
in
Baghdad." Harlan Ullman drew a parallel to Hiroshima: the
Iraqi
people will be "physically, emotionally and psychologically
exhausted"; it will be "like the nuclear weapons at
Hiroshima, not
taking days or weeks but minutes." The point is "to
impose
overwhelming level of Shock and Awe, to seize control of the
environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary's
perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would
be incapable of resistance."
This is Shock and Awe, remember,
not Wyoming.
But it gets hard to tell them
apart: overwhelming levels seizing
control, paralyzing perceptions and understanding.
That works for Wyoming and
just about anywhere in the United
States.
That's the problem with living
inside Dick Cheney's mind, whether
we've chosen to or not.
What's the point of Shock and
Awe?
To free the Iraqi people.
Problem: "No safe place
in Baghdad" contradicts "To free the Iraqi
people."
Rationale: Since the Iraqi
people are enslaved inside Saddam
Hussein's mind, that mind must be destroyed. That means
destroying Saddam Hussein's body, which means brushing aside
Baghdad to find him to free the Iraqi people trapped inside his
mind.
But dead people are free only
in the most limited way. Not much
bang for the buck there.
Deeper rationale: It's an adult
world. Shock and Awe is adult
political theater for a world audience. To reach an audience
that
big you have to project. That's the point of Shock, the sheer
size
of which has never, etc. Otherwise the audience won't be struck
with Awe.
What's the point of Awe?
Awe kills two birds with one
stone. For the right Arabs, it
inaugurates democracy, or something, somehow. For the wrong
Arabs, Awe will . . . what? Awe will awe them into submission.
I can hear Dick Cheney arguing
that Awe worked at Hiroshima.
But Japan was at war with us,
and Awe, or at least Instant
Submission, didn't work outside Japan. The Iraqi people are not
only not at war with us, we're rescuing them from Saddam
Hussein's mind. And as for working outside Baghdad? Destroying
it will awe al-Qaeda? That's a stretch. There are more al-Qaedans
in London or Berlin than in Baghdad. Maybe we should get Berlin
first.
No matter how big you make
Shock, you can't get to Awe.
Forget it: We'll never know
the exact route from Wyoming to
Shock and Awe.
But Shock and Awe is already
halfway here: Here, Baghdad and
Here, Wyoming. We're half "physically, emotionally and
psychologically exhausted"; our "perceptions and understanding"
are half "overloaded."
But even half a mind is enough
to do the math: We're half capable
of resistance.
The shocks are gigantic, disgusting,
but at least they're not
shocking, once we give up our imaginary safety.
The other half, Awe with its
ersatz religious capital letter, we can
resist.
The weapons are huge and thoughtless,
but they don't deserve a shred of awe.
A small victory, but it's one
weapon destroyed, the one they
always use first.
Bob Perelman is a poet and a professor of English
at the University of Pennsylvania. The Shock and Awe language
comes from Web sites found on Google under "Shock and Awe."
He can be reached at: perelman@english.upenn.edu
Excerpts from "Gulf
War Cycle" (1991)
By ELIOT KATZ
Bomb Shelter Blues
Four hundred children, women
& elderly men
killed in a Baghdad shelter,
which by all major media assumptions
was really a military command center--
since Bush's gang by definition
would never aim at civilians
despite all the evidence one sees
walking Port Authority Bus Station's basement.
ABC Eyewitness News takes it
to New York City streets
all 4 Americans interviewed shrug shoulders--
no regrets; human ashes just part of a just war.
It's tough to know where to point the camera lens:
When the news skims off dissent
it's a heartless film which floats to the top.
Vigil
Demonstrate--and generals tremble
Organize--and borders collapse
March--and feet get wet in the Ethical Lake
Dissent--and Earth becomes the Golden Realm
The Cooking Show
Defense Secretary Cheney says
it's unacceptable
to allow Saddam the possibility
"to rearm and, rather than spend
the nation's wealth on improving
the circumstances of his people,
rebuild his military machine."
What chef worth their cayenne
will not recognize
an American recipe?
Well Done
With Iraqi troops attempting
to exit Kuwait
& the figleaf cover of war's rationale shed
Bush has ordered
continued
tankread slaughter.
Since TV's corporate pundits have proven capable
of mesmerizing
America's yellow ribbon majority
such naked viciousness provides quite
the popular thrill.
As war now approaches its bloody
close
America's free press applauds the defeat
of our "Vietnam Syndrome."
Once again the USA can bomb
without televised guilt!
Now war at any cost!
Once more we can give war a chance!
Finally, we can find our favorite
high-tech weapon
on a Topps trading card!
Soon the United Statesmen of Bechtel
will get back to work
rebuilding oil-filled Kuwait
for a slick price.
Post-War Culture
Gilgamesh
succeeded
in his spiritual
quest
&
returned
home
tired
&
thirsty
for
a
Pepsi Light.
Eliot Katz, 1991
Eliot Katz is the author of Unlocking
the Exits (Coffee House Press, 1999),
in which "Gulf War Cycle" originally appeared. A coeditor
of Poems for the Nation
(Seven Stories Press, 2000), he is the new poetry editor of the
online politics quarterly, Logos.
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Features
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Jews)
Mitchel Cohen
The
Gulf War 12 Years Later: Why Class Matters
Carlos Fuentes
The Insulting Insinuations of the Bush Regime
Fareed Marjaee
The Road to Jerusalem Goes Through Baghdad
Rick Giombetti
The Savagely Soft Underbelly
of the Anti-War Movement: Misquided Faith in the UN
Rich Procter
Rove Memo: How to Launch a War
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War: the Smoking Guns
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