[Newspoetry] Beware of being led by emotions: blind-cite.

[emerick at chorus.net]

Cheney and G.O.P. Mount Vigorous Assault on Kerry
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and ROBIN TONER  --  NYT 040902
Veep Cheney said that the nation's fundamental security was at stake in the presidential election.

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You must watch National Political Conventions,
but have no eyes to judge a truth of the said.
You are blind-sided, blind-sighted, blind-sited
if you believe a show unrolls before your eyes --
staging is only staging, acting only acting,
big emotional scenes are all carefully scripted,
a smile is not a smile, a kiss is not a kiss,
as these pseudo-times go passing by your eyes.

Hollywood News on production sets,
of an uproarious "live" TV show,
filmed before "live" studio audiences,
a "live" audience sees a show happening,
in panoptical illusions of living color --
as if plain black and white truth were dead --
and know that it is a show, only a show,
for a sound track to be dubbed later,
when images are doctored, the ads added --
and supplements a "reality tv" series
that spoofs and belittles life's struggles,
debasing it to level morons understand --
and news papers follow English standards,
proclaiming that the only news fit to print
must be in texts made for third grade readers,
so that even the simplest might be made wise.

The race to the bottom accelerates;
aims of civilization become inverted,
brains drain themselves, slow and stop:
idle minds are devils' playgrounds.

Dehydration and starvation soaps operate;
they cleanse minds of analogic reasoning,
reducing structured wholes to rubble fields
full of rubbery holes where minds fall in,
where roaches feast on rotting stem cells,
breeding new generations fit only to serve,
fit to serve only because they dare not think.

Bored by both unreformed, plat-formed parties,
deformed and monstruous, ill-informing us,
I turned to a more distant visual memory,
to reason about what I see with both eyes.

I see no monkey scene from Clark's Y2K+1,
which he quaintly named two-thousand one
before its antecedent triple zero problem
became a matter of fear and uncertainty,
relentlessly exploited techno-phobic angst,
evoking hatred in masses for mere machines
that do only what their masters bid them do.

Rather, I see another monkey-kind of scene,
one that Margaret Mead might have filmed,
or some one of that ilk might have filmed,
because someone did film it, I saw it shown,
right there before my being-educated eyes,
being indoctrinated in sociologic imagery,
so that my own memory gels in bedrock truth,
unquestioned and unquestionable histrionics.

Mead-like tells no ale swilled and drunk
in halls where BeoWulf howls in the dark,
howls at the halls he can not entertain
except reigns fear fashionable, accepted --
Me-ad-like are frozen images of horror,
harrowed over, over in heaves of terror.

The socio-patho-logician shows two tribes,
confronting one another before combat,
the rousing rites of territory, identity,
masculinity parading as unrevised humanity.

The tribes form almost parallel lines,
as if instinct makes faces and gestures,
for insulting sounds to differ in defiance,
as weapons of war wave, stirring the air
so blood might be spilled in the vortex,
caught up in a whirlwind, taken in spirit:
they throw their shit at one another,
face-to-face they come but fece-to-fece.

I will beat you, fuck you, eat you
and all those who in your house do go
and all that is in your shall be mine,
that I may make a pleasing sacrifice
unto a Lord, burn offerings in thanks,
proving myself by destroying my excess.

So did the hoary-gory political tribes,
in all Democratic and Republican virtue,
appear before my eyes, balcony ghosts,
beacons of beckoning to be conventions,
"Or, not to be", BeoWulf inconveniently said,
pre-writing words for each hamlet, middlesex,
village, and farm to throw up in alarm:
"The Broodish are coming, are coming,
The Broodish are coming to Our Town,"
Grendel grandiloquently grins again,
wipes that grin off your purloined fece,
and calls for meat -- for me at last.

Oh, these happy golden years of images,
torn, limb from limb, fallen out of trees,
like burnished leaves that downward tumble,
tumble down like London Bridges, tumble weed
to blossom and grow, bloom and grow forever,
and ever, and ever, hallelujah, hallelujah, ...
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming
and the going, a path lying between two points,
a pathologic lying that simply can not help.