POETIC PUFFERY

POETIC PUFFERY
(Giving Honor to U.S. Killing Fields)

Again The Arizona Republic never misses an opportunity to celebrate jingoism and spread-eaglism. Instead of its usual chauvinistic prose, on 11-11-05 they chose to contaminate poetry with its icon worship of death and war. Of course they chose whose uniform to honor and whose dead is to receive a vow of faith never to be broken.

I would ask these flag waving demagogues, “Is there a man or woman among you who would apply such rhetoric to Hitler’s and Stalin’s dead soldiers, or even the dead soldiers of the Confederacy, or the dead Indian warriors from whom we stole their country?” I’m absolutely sure, that unless they were to lie through their teeth, their answer would be a resounding “NO!”

Below is the poem Flanders Fields written by John Alexander McCrae that was chosen by The Arizona Republic to give honor to and pledge faith to wholesale slaughter.

In Flanders fields poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

If poetry be the pathway to explaining or exploring war, I propose the following poem by Mark Twain, The War Prayer:
O Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers [and detainees] to bloody shreds with our-shells-help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to turn them roofless with their little children to wander unfriended, the waste of their desolated land in hunger and thirst. We ask it, in the spirit of love.

Here’s another perspective to view how the alleged mind of these mindless war worshippers works:
For the past couple of weeks the mainstream media and government propagandists have been raging (correctly I might add) against the terrorists who bombed a Jordanian wedding killing many innocent men, women, and children (in other words human beings). This they patriotically proclaim as evidence for the “difference” between terrorists and us.

Below is how such jingoists stick their big, fat, fucking feet in their Janus-faced mouths:
It was in July 2002, when American B52 bombers flew over an Afghanistan wedding and launched a two-thousand pound bomb into the celebration killing many innocent men, women and children (in other words human beings). Oh! Not so fast, it’s been explained to me how, as Thomas Aquinas explained long ago and the Pentagon has confirmed -- these were not human beings but collateral damage!

So prose is not slighted as a means to separate semanticide from the truth, I close with the following lines by George Santayana, “To call war the sail of courage for heroism is like calling debauchery the sail of love.