[Newspoetry] Newspoem Halloween 2007

[Spineless Books]

Newspoem 31 October 2007
The Rise and Fallacies of the American Empire

Nothing is knowable. With aphoristic sentences we connect data points  
into triangulated constellations. The trick they use is to announce,  
in mass media headlines, that "there is a debate." This is the year- 
long drumbeat that introduced the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There is, it  
is now said, "a debate"  about the use of nuclear weapons in a  
preemptive first strike against Iran.

There was never such a debate -- the idea has always been unanimously  
considered horrific. By staging the existence of a "debate" about  
using nuclear weapons, torture, invading yet another country, they  
subtly introduce the falsity that there is a serious school of  
thought that advocates such atrocities, a school of thought equipped  
with logical arguments. Then they continue to insinuate the existence  
of a "debate" for months until people gradually begin to explicitly  
and consciously reject these amoral idiocies, thereby legitimizing them.

Look, if you heard that there was debate about whether the Earth was  
shaped like a cube, you might laugh. But if you saw news of this  
"debate" in the Washington Post every week and let it get to you, you  
might, by angrily, stubbornly asserting that the Earth was of course  
very nearly spherical, in no way cube-like -- as has been known for  
centuries, as asserted by photographic evidence from space -- start  
to lend a backhanded credibility to the cubists. You feel and look a  
little desperate, sputtering about your round Earth.

The idea of a nuclear first strike against a non-nuclear nation with  
no means nor threats to launch any sort of effective military attack  
against the US is absurd, abhorrent, overthrows six decades of common  
sense and credible science, undermines two millennia of moral  
thought, serves no coherent geopolitical, diplomatic, or economic  
goal, NOT EVEN PURE SELF-INTEREST, and can only fuck the world for  
everybody including the rich and powerful who support the idea. But  
every day I seem to read a little more about this "debate."

Our grandparents complained about how soft and easy our life is. So  
too may our grandchildren, living in a world without trees after the  
last fiery nuclear fall.

In this autumnal light, nothing can make sense. Nuclear weapons  
destroy all life. Nuclear weapons destroy meaning. Bush and Cheney  
destroy meaning. Unelected ideas have come to power in a  
democratically controlled language.

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