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POETRYETC  2005

POETRYETC 2005

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Subject:

Re: Anti-War Demo San Francisco - a little report

From:

Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 22:18:41 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

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A good friend of mine of six years' duration was a leftist activist and
student at the Episcopal Church Divinity School of the Pacific, so she
filled me in on life in the Bay Area with comments like "Only in San
Francisco." I visited the city for a week in 1965, too long ago to
remember much except how every second person asked me how to get to
then-Candlestick Park for the Beatles concert.

So nothing really surprises me in what you report except this:

> The weirdest:
> Free Hinkley

Give me a break. We all know what it means. You and I are old enough
to remember the JFK assassination. Not to mention Malcolm, King, Bobby,
even the attempt on George Wallace. Welcome to America, where if you
don't agree with someone's actions, you shoot their ass off. Great.

We lived through the worst American public traumas of the 20th century.
Okay, I wasn't around for McKinley and Anton Cermak, but I guess I got
enough.

What the hell is this, the Dominican Republic? Bush is that animal
Trujillo? Aside from the likelihood that Trujillo was smarter, how do I
construe "Free Hinckley" as anything but a call for a repetition of a
nightmare, invoked probably by a bunch of punk-assed kids whose only
context for what they're asking for is John Wilkes Booth back in April
1865. If they were in history class that day. Have they examined the
implications of what they seem to want? Have they considered what would
happen to their "movement" and anyone in the vicinity if someone started
popping caps in the people they seem to think deserve it? They accuse
the government of repression, but they will see repression that makes
the military tribunals and railroading of the Lincoln (Maybe)
Conspirators look like a lawn party at the Glyndebourne Opera House..

> ...one senses two things:
> 1. The built-up rage is much more focused on Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld -
> their lies, deception, and what many have become to openly declare as
> criminal behavior.

Right, there is rage. There should be. I might as well stick my neck
out and say what I suspect lots of people suspect. Bush is not quite
stupid as I suspect he is being kept trashed on the same intoxicants
that that Rev. Billy Graham talked him out of using. Who is feeing
him? Cheney. Rumsfeld. Condi Rice. Bette Midler's joke about Bush
getting tickets from his coke dealer may not be all that funny.

> 2. A deep sense of collective violation and lament- that we, the
> Republic,
> have been almost irreparably damaged by the behavior, decisions and
> consequences of this regime. A hopelessness - in the process of the
> Demo -
> negated to a degree by walking, walking between the speeches, between
> Start
> and Finish. Even as this so-called leadership begins to openly implode,
> there is fear that the damage and debts incurred may be ones from
> which it
> will take great leadership to recover. And, 'pray tell us', I suspect
> many
> of us are asking, where on the political horizon is such leadership?

So instead of action, instead of a campaign of vilification and slander
(see above), let's get our own generational John Hinckley. Who will be
his inspiration, Paris Hilton or J.Lo? Instead of fighting the right by
buying up media (when did George Soros go broke; and AirAmerica will do
far better when they dump those buffoons Al Francken and Jeannine
Garafolo), go ahead, street folks, call for shooting someone. Really
damn swift. Diem, Kennedy, Kennedy, Malcolm, Wallace. Or, if you like
culture wars, Larry Flynt. The American solution to all the world's
problems: shoot someone.

Vilification and slander: go after Hannity, go after O'Reilly, go after
Ann Coulter. If you can get truth, good. If you can't, rumors and
innuendo will do. It worked for the Swift Boat operatives last year, it
might work for us this now and in years to come. Someday the left in
this country will learn how to use the Ty Cobb method of stealing second
base: slide in with sharpened spikes and tear up a guy's tendons so he
done. It's dirty but it works.

I despise assassination. I hate a filthy exchange of words but it's
just about that time. We are fighting for our country. OUR country.
Not that little drunk's, not that heart patient's, not the woman Eliot
Weinberger called Xena Warrior Princess. Ours.

End of exhortation.

Ken

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