For Mears
This a poem from someone who spent some time on the front lines in a different dirty USG/CIA affair, from the start of the American Holocaust in Central America, but perhaps Mears these words will entertain you...
RETURN
...go try on
Americans your long, dull story
of corruption, but better to give
them what they want: Lil Milagro Ramirez,
who after years of confinement did not
know what year it was, how she walked
with help and was forced to s*it in public.
Tell them about the razor, the live wire,
dry ice and concrete, grey rats and above all
who f*cked her, how many times and when.
Tell them about retaliation: Jose lying
on the flat bed trick, waving his stumps
in your face, his hands cut off by his
captors and thrown to the many acres
of cotton, still, and holding
the lasr few lumps of leeched earth.
Tell them of Jose in his last few hours
and later, many months later,
a labor leader was cut to pieces and buried.
Tell them how his friends found
the soldiers and made them dig him up
and ask forgiveness of the corpse, once
it was assembled again on the ground
like a man. As for the cars, of course
they watch you and for this don't flatter
yourself. We are all watched. We are
all assembled.
<snip>
And so, you say, you've learned a little
about starvation: a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were cut from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
lie in their beds at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
That they cup their own parts
with their bedsheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to a wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands of those who erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer have the hearts,
the strength, the lives of women.
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.
-- Carolyn Forche, 1980
Mears I seem to recall posting the above for you before, somewhere post 9-11, me bewildered then how any thinking human being in the US would even tolerate a discussion of a USG option for torture. It is simply and absolutely impermissible. But, fools that we are, the Salvadorean torturers Carolyn refers to in her poem were TRAINED at the School of the Americas, Ft. Benning, Georgia, with refresher courses throughout the eighties and early nineties.
Them days at least our government had the good sense to try and hide it; these days they're proud of it.
We as a nation have been hugely disgraced by the actions of GWB and his henchmen. Bush on so many things rises light-years above the threshold set by Republicans for "high crimes and misdemeanors" when they impeached Bill Clinton, their failure to act now reveals the base hipocrisy that underlies all they do.
How do you sleep at night, Mears? Ambien? Something stronger?