our betters have been keeping us safe since at least the 1600s....
"keep us safe"
cried the screened
weeded people,
pledging allegiance
to the identity-plied,
personified,
bipolar caparisoned,
uniformly garrisoned,
paranoid psychopath
*
as he murdered
three million
Southeast Asians;
as he theorized
in the slipstream
of domination,
twiddling
his
tipping dominoes,
dodging natural
comparisons
with Hitler;
as he fenced in
the stolen plots
of
used to be México;
as his successive
'presidential' precedents
thumped their brazen chests
or mourned the "loss" of Cuba
handing on or mislaying
that Caribbean island "bead"
in their entrusted, encrusted
bejewelled "necklace";
as his pure race embracing
unreal estating agents
astonishingly redistricted
the entirety of Latin America
as his zoned,
owned "backyard";
as his eternally famished,
never questioned "interests"
swallowed an ocean
and
still found room
to "pivot" to China;
as he snapped at the heels
of the giant slayers,
Sasha and Alexei,
the very day
they climbed the Czar's beanstalk,
to snatch the barest
exemplary breeze,
lest a serf
should accidentally
happen on
uncommodifiable freedom;
as he went on the lamb
from sheepish justice,
fancying himself
the
'essential global policeman'
sanctioning
hysterical hallucinations
of
hypothetical constructions
of the unconscionable
nuclear weapons
he's yet to face
charges for using;
as he silenced
entire language families
in the
unchatteled wilderness
haunting
his
unrecognised despair;
as he divvied and chivvied
the 'underdeveloped'
yet to be enveloped,
battered and tattered,
spattered survivors
along
his whitewashed
periphery,
'protecting'
the 'global south'
from
their myriad
better selves;
as he tore through
the crusade plagued,
profit planed,
Armegeddon stained,
broken cradle
of
civilisation
riddling the Middling East,
thrusting imperfect
fragile congregations
of precariously existing,
careworn human beings
and
other innocent
bystanding
or falling,
flying
or
crawling living things
into that Western paling
colonial 'consensus'
hailing consumptive
presumptive intervention's
newly improved,
patriot behooved,
mass induced stone age;
as his teaming,
steamed and seeming
'liberals' and 'conservatives'
(by all their other names)
shouted down
their respective narrative
and media consortiums'
complacent abidings
in stylishly dialed,
carefully filed,
riled pride;
as he arranged countless coups
in that peculiarly American
theocracy shrouded,
hypocrisy compounded,
counterintuitive "spreading"
shredding
of
democracy;
as he hounded
and impounded
the would be shining seeds
in the
sea of seen to
curbed and churning,
spurned seers of truth,
stamping out
the slightest
sentient
bloom;
as he became the number one
weapon's supplier
on earth,
pimping every lethal
plaything
of
the devil
from pocket humping
(not just glad to see you) pistols
to the latest
fiendish invention
to
sizzle skin
and leave no trace,
so dependably advertised
by Hollywood's spurting,
flirtful diverting,
crowning of thy good;
routinely endorsed by
an abdicated media,
turned state's witness
a century ago
with the
impress of freedom's
zombie resurrection,
born again
as the establishment's
stenographers of record;
reflexively enforced
by a "state" department
long given over
to a
'resistance is futile'
bullying asunder
for piracy's plunder,
furthering the
prospective
convective disaffecting
of the CIA's
hedged and betting
Read against the terrible incineration of Rafah today, this poem of resistance and refusal, by Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim, is as powerful now as it was fifty years ago.
I spoke to William Sakawa, a producer and reporter with the Nairobi-based media outlet African Stream, about Kenyan President William Ruto’s agreement to invade Haiti for the US.
"Hearing! Hearing! Hearing!" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
This week’s featured authors are Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen. Their book is The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition.
Despite the undeserved loyalty of Black people to the Democratic Party, lawmakers continue to push policy that ignores concerns about climate change and environmental damage in their communities.
