[Newspoetry] newspoem 1 january

[DL Emerick]

Newspoem 1 January 2007 -- another draft horse

Crime and Punishment: Violating Human Rights

when global dictators their critics disappear
though hatcheted bodies come home to widows,
Uncle Sam still wants his pieces in fleshpots.

His brow unfurls rifts between headlines:
To be sure, let us note "a ruthless strongman:
Someone who gladly traffics in our business" --
A solemnly earnest, feignedly reluctant partner.
When he rules our way, he is highly extolled -
Wayward, then US TV execution video unrolled.

Death he dealt to 300,000 dissidents.
And all with our consenting aid of weapons
But when he into dissenting fell, opposing us,
then some 600,00 more found their liberation,
in most democratic dialogues of war and peace

can misguided sense tease out of this any moral?

our neighborhood butcher, purpose served and ended,
shocks awed the world citizen by how he's expended:
overextended, per the New Year's Eve Sunday Times,
Time was working double shifts of judicial meanings,
after a dubious, politicized trial before judges unskilled.
During which three defense lawyers were killed.

By verdict, Hussein was quickly hanged, to get past it,
Though, and as well, marring a Sunni religious holiday.

The conviction stood only for the few, symbolically,
Of one small crime in a basketcase full of them,
Those of one 1988 crime, a killing of 148 civilians --
Mooted were any conclusion of the trial for genocide
As in killing chemically 5000 Kurds in that same year --
All such crimes that shall now go on, forever free,
Of censure and rebuke -- any blame to complicity.

Opining, solemnly, afterwards, in post-script:
Europe's Union advocates ending death penalties;
the Vatican holy offices call the execution "tragic";
Russia's Foreign Ministry was a stoical stern critic;
Burgeoning super-power (subaltern) India frowned
And all that was from our allies, not foes, fictioning:

"revenge in a vulgar way" is depraved, a "raw barbarity"
When taken so "hasty and premature", "vindictive" is
"Texan law, the rule of the strong, . evil . unprincipled"

At last, hooray, we have brought democracy to Iraq:
Wal-Mart says "Sales increased in December" -
So toll the closing bells of Wall Street, ever rising,
In capitalism's paeans to capital punishment crimes.