[Newspoetry] Appalling Lacks of Standards

[Donald L Emerick]

Bush Bashes to Yellow Level of Terrorism
By PHILIP SHENON
Intelligence reports that threat of terrorist attacks
has decreased with the fall of Saddam Hussein.


Appalling Lacks of Standards

1.  There is no objective standard for what constitutes a threat.
2.  There is very little that distinguishes between threat levels:
     how could anyone tell where it should begin,
     or how it should change, up or down, or side-ways,
     or upside-down, or inside-out, and so on?
3.  But, it sounds so scientific, this mumbo-jumbo deceit.
4.  It makes the government sound like it knows something.
5.  It makes the government sound informed and sensible.
6.  It makes the government sound valuable and protective.
7.  It makes the government the keeper of the big lie itself.
8.  It would be impossible to sue the government for lying, here,
     despite the total absence of any objective standards.
9.  Besides, people want to believe this big lie so badly.
10.  What's the difference between Threat-Level and Christmas?
11.  The lack of truth is no legal bar to a government program,
       unless the program completely lacks every possible reason,
       or violates the law in some other constitutional sense.
12.  This is the legal standard of minimal rationality,
       that government may choose almost any program,
       and have no one be able to contest its choice,
       on any grounds of rationality.
13.  To say something is legal is thus only to say,
       even if fools completely make some program up,
       a government of the fools, by the fools, for the fools
       is not forbidden by the Constitution of the United States.
14.  Such an extremely low legal standard
       for intelligent, rational self-government
       is expressly designed to remove the check and balance
       that the judiciary was supposed to deploy
       against the follies of elected officials.
15.  Such an extremely low legal standard
       is bound to frustrate more of the people, more of the time,
       when they are in a party of opposition to the government.
16.  Such an extremely low legal standard
       risks extreme variances were plebeians to contest elites.
17.  Such an extremely low legal standard, though,
       is bound to encourage a very broad coalition of the elites,
       by making every program's political deal unassailable.
18.  By acting together, elites may decisively crush
       more numerous plebian classes, for dictatorship of masses.
19.  (Certain books, written about the previous lives
       of privileged party elites of former communist countries,
       taught us, once again, that unchecked government power
       always results in the formation of a grand coalition of elites,
       whose only great fear is that mad-men like Stalin, Saddam,
       who find self-aggrandizement to be too pleasurable to stop.)
20.  Besides that, I really hate the Government's choices
       both of the colors named and of the hues chosen:
       but bad aesthetic taste is the least order of today.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick

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