Empire Rage

Catching Lines

I admit to being one of those people who can't listen to the
President.

Lines like, "The votes have been counted and recounted," still
hang me up, "Bringing democracy to the Middle East,"
reminds me of Mark Twain who suggested the Missionaries
come back from Africa and save the Presbyterians.

While my own personal favorite line was "Japan and the
United States have been good friends for a hundred years,"
it wasn't long before I stopped laughing at anything he said.
Even the News screen last week with his picture and a
title line below that said --
Bush: The Worst Disaster in History
didn't make me laugh out loud.

In the early years, when we were only invading one
country at a time, before American kids looted Baghdad, set up
torture camps, about the time the GW declared the right
to assassinate anyone anywhere in the world, when they
were spying on the books we took out of the library, before
the colossal incompetence of the Federal response to Katrina--

I began to exhibit disturbing symptoms of a disorder
that hasn't yet been listed in the mental health diagnostic books,
but will--

Empire Rage.

I lost my sense of humor, scowled at babies, neglected
to feed the outdoor cats, possums, raccoons, ferrets, armadillos,
grackles, doves, mockingbirds. I was permanently pissed off.
If George W. Bush, or Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfield,
Gale Norton, or even Colin Powell flashed on television
I hit the mute button, and fumed.

I thought about the Republicans who were red faced furious
because Bill Clinton liked oral sex.

I didn't want to be as sick as that,
decided to find something about GW that didn't make
me furious.

Some people have been able to like his wife,
but look who she hangs out with.
After months of photo ops -- that jerk striding across the
lawn of the White House, he waves to the press, giggles,
then stoops to pat his dog--
I realized I like dogs.

So while Laura and the twins are odious to me, the dog
is probably just a dog. I am able to like it.

Tonite we played
"catch a line," while Bush in a blue work
shirt addressed the nation from the French Quarter
in New Orleans.

Reporters weren't allowed on the lawn, had to sit in trucks
across the street while the Prez was guarded by the likes of the
Blackwater Brigade, the highest paid assassins in the world,
just back from Iraq.

We clicked him on and off, catching lines --

"An opportunity for military involvement."

"The Gulf Coast was swept clean by wind and water."

"An Army of Compassion."

"Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship."

"In this age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction
there are worse things than a flood or earthquake fault."

It is perhaps a sign that I am recovering from Empire Rage that
I was able to refrain from tirades between lines -- tho it was hard
to resist "swept clean by wind and water."

He went out fantasizing a jazz funeral,
hangin' on the dirge line, but indicated, it would soon turn celebratory.

Wow.
Are there 12 Step programs for Empire Rage?

©copyright, Susan Bright

Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.

Home

What it is About

Earthfamily Principles

Earthfamilyalpha Content

Links