Scorpion of Light (2006)
Light stings when vermin crawl out from under the hypocrisies trash.
Ellen Goodman says:
If I had my druthers, this election would have turned on the war in Iraq. I hoped that when the voters finally got it, "it" would have been the disaster that's turned this war zone into a recruiting ground for terrorists.
Instead we have the self-described party of family values caught enabling or at least ignoring a sick puppy of a congressman, Mark Foley, who was sex-talking electronically to teenage pages. Instead we have Speaker Dennis Hastert dismissing such an exchange as merely "over-friendly" and White House press secretary Tony Snow describing the messages as "naughty." We even have right-wing Webmaster Matt Drudge blaming the teenagers themselves as "16- and 17-year-old beasts."
This scandal is what has registered on the political Richter scale. This is what voters are asking their representatives about. Well, I wouldn't have chosen to play on this field, but I will take it.
[...]
The Republicans have been all-too-successful in getting a hold on the language and politics of values. There isn't a parent in this country who doesn't wince at and worry about the sexualization of children all over the culture from the clothing racks to the Internet. But the right has grabbed onto the free-floating anxiety and attached it to everything on their agenda from abstinence-only education to the dismissal of a Texas teacher for taking her kids to a museum that had nude statues.
Now we are beginning to get "it." The self-proclaimed party of moral values can't keep its own House in order. The Republicans in charge of too much for too long have one value they now hold above all others: staying in power. Got it? Well, that's a start.
Yeah, sex sells -- even if torture and war and lies and a Constitution reduced to cinders and countless other Republican atrocities won't wake a Big Brotherized, Rovian fear-mongered electorate.
Whatever it takes. If you can't put Capone away for murder and racketeering -- then tax evasion will accomplish the same end.
It doesn't much matter how and where you're stung...
1 comment:
Scorpion
Wishing to go unnoticed before its sting,
ornate as Allah's broach or a Fabergé
egg within a halo of turquoise stars,
it pulsates upon a ruby, patrician breast
secrets to outlive its jeweler's craft
so deep underground that the shock
waves muffle against any cold that
autumnal lips might whip or whimper
when once speech was free kissing
which staunched time and poison.
This scarab from a mummy's tongue molts
clandestine signatures of an ancient bribe
into arabesques of red dust, brazen
shingles registering a heraldry
no aristocratic fez could disguise,
transformations within the cocoon
whose droppings breed and blister along
the inner thighs, thousands smiling
that await taste and penetration
only a mullah could savage or invoke
before the engorged serpent's womb.
Now desert reclaims the earth, blue pools
dissolve into a mirage, and white
flesh cakes and peels from the bone,
as ostrich feathers undulate, provoking
these crimson, spiteful, veiled progeny
to whirl and snarl, encircling their prey
for the sport of prolonging pain
before the final ecstasy shudders
through each victim's veins,
eyes rolling back in their skulls.
[Disposable Poem October 10, 2006]
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