[Newspoetry] The Rule of Lawn Order

[DL Emerick]

In Olivier Roy's op-ed piece, NYTimes today, the Professor from the School for Advanced Studies in Social Science -- oh, beware such teachers of such sciences as come from such schools as these -- writes on the "personal" motivations of those terrorists whom we presently deem to be somehow attacking, amorphous and polysemic as they may happen to be, having no truly established group identity, no principles of organization, no status as an entity, certainly none of any legal status, and thus having no recognized status as a collectivity of any kind.

That is, Roy's analysis problem begins and ends -- starts and stops -- rises and sets -- with the cycle of time, the day and the night, that he employs, without ever mentioning the multiple structurings of life that flow with its sense of time.

Roy says it is a generational thing: "they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations".  Here, we have a massive failure of social integration, where society should have channelled these youths into productive and healthy life styles, provided opportunities for entrepreneurial spirits to arise, letting free capitalist protestantism emerge.

If Roy's analysis stands, we might infer that we shall have to wait for the aging of a generation for incidences of this terrorism to pass away -- and we shall have to hunt down and kill as many as possible of these lurking malcontents, in the meantime, to keep them in check.

That's how I read what Roy's piece seems to suggest.  If he had spoken of weeds on lawns, of dandelions in grass, every middle-american would have known what we have to do.  We have to poison the very earth itself to kill the things we don't like -- unless we disagree with the culture and cultivation of grass as a way of life, unless we turn away from the shallowness of make-work life that is sub-urbanian lawnification.

Someone should have told us that long ago they tossed grass seeds out on the deserts of the middle east.  Grass once covered over all of that now ugly wasted earth.  Babylon was fabulously wealthy -- it even had gardens hanging from its tall buildings of the worlds, the wonder of all the world.  And, up river, the great rivers met, formed and flowed, from the very navel of the world's soft underbelly, this grassy, furry middle east that once was the center of the world, and thus of the entire universe and of all its galaxies, no matter how far flung.

Oh, there above Babylon, up river, where the rivers knotted or unknotted themselves, there was Eden, its very sacred and private and forbidden self.  Paradise never needed to have its lawn mowed, its grasses were that well behaved.  And, the people who woke in Eden and walked each day in Paradise -- oh they were indeed lovers and helpmates, knowing nothing else to be doing, except to be living in peace.

The grass withers and the flowers fade -- so says Scriptures -- dooming every Eden to its fate.  Babylon fell because its irrigation programs brought mineral-rich waters, yearly, out to cover the fields.  In the interest of increasing, for a time, agricultural production enormously, they lightly salted the earth and it became a waste land, the one that haunts us today.

Oh, we plant grass and we blame terrorists for their hate, while we frolic out on our green lawns in love.  It is justice and there is nothing that time can undo, nothing that time can do.  The earth spins on its axis, like a top, the days come and go, the grass grows and it dies.

Beware the dandelions that lurk in the grasses, my friends.  Their prolific beauty hungers for life, and conquers all civilizations of grass if they do not defend themselves, as the rule of lawn order.