I see people, wild-eyed and
frothing at the mouth, seduced by the Machiavellian machinations of a political
system slaking itself on corporate money, jingoism and ignorance.
I hear what passes for debate
today, high-pitched banshee wails, schoolyard insults and idiotic prattle
spoken from the mouths of talking heads and partisan puppets, mean-spirited
drivel crafted towards inciting hatred and division.
I speak for moderation, kindness
and tolerance, but am branded some radical subversive, a socialist, a
communist, a freethinker, a liberal, even though I'm not. My words add to the deafening cacophony
shouted through every talk show host’s microphone, drowned out by the
recalcitrant and inflexible dullards plodding towards their work stations,
padding their bank accounts with blood money.
American beauty is withering and
dying, shriveling and blackening like a rose petal left in the sun. Its
majestic hues turning grey and grotesque, its sweet fruits turning bitter.
We’ve traded hope for harshness,
generosity for greed. Once we blossomed, now we decay.
I see people abandoning reason for
dogma, tripping over their feet on the way to the altar, stumbling towards
rallies with their signs aloft, scribbled in a hideous language barely
resembling English.
I see the ghosts of Lincoln, Kennedy and Reagan filing into a McDonalds, evaporating at the
screeching banality of reality television and the latest tabloid sleaze
belching forth from whiskered editors blaring headlines ridiculing the American
Dream.
I smell a bonfire of burning flags
and Qurans, a funeral pyre for a lost generation scared out of its wits, beaten
to submission, tattooed, frightened, miserable. They scream profanities at the
full moon, and like some frenzied cultists in a midnight pagan rite, dance
beneath Washington’s stone columns and marble edifices.
Their tongues knotted with lies and
half-truths, their warchests brimming with ill-gotten riches, our leaders rush
with flaming torches toward Moloch’s open maw, feeding the beast the frayed
parchment of the U.S. Constitution.
The multitudes swarm into mass
confusion, stampeding each other for the latest iPad, crushing their ribcages
for an iPhone or shiny toy, some petty triviality, mind candy for the starving.
This unstoppable juggernaut rolls over itself, flesh tearing and blood flowing
like sangria into the gutter.
And the owl, watching from its
lofty branch, emits a chuckle, as the destitute sportingly descend.
Whosoever holds the golden skeleton
key to unlocking our utopia, remains dead and buried, felled by an assassin’s
bullet long ago, silenced for all time, leaving his children to wander clueless
and blind, and at their own pitiful folly.
Heavy chains around his neck,
drowned fathoms down, he is one for the ages, a murky example of greatness felled
by hubris.
I see America wrestling with doubt,
teetering over a deep precipice, on the verge of extinction. Its poets, artists and writers all gagged, their mouths muzzled for the greater good. Its
intellectuals lobotomized and drooling on white tiled floors. Its businesses
locked in metal vaults, suffocating and gasping for breath. Its scientists
muted by a lack of funding, beakers and test tubes gathering cobwebs.
I see its potential raped and
strangled and stuffed into the trunk of a Chevy Impala and driven into the icy
waters of the Potomac. No escape for the last generation.
Our final act plays out amid
bunting, balloons and a chorus of the “Star Spangled Banner. Confetti bathes
the crowd like red, white and blue rain. We move, stupefied, and fall before
the crumbling walls of Jericho.
Plagues plummet from the sky, and over
the airwaves, and in our quiet, manicured tree-lined suburban streets. Shysters
delivering us liberty and freedom packaged in Styrofoam and chocked full of
high fructose corn syrup.
We are the scions of our own
destruction, the humble few who cower in coffee shops, under tables and in
basements. We see the eagle crying as its wings are clipped. We shout out to
the mountains not to recede, for the oceans to remain placid.
Yet our dream, like our frail
bones, must turn to dust.
