I am saddened by the way we move so quickly to demonize our enemies, so slowly to wonder how they came to be the enemies that they are.
And I am terribly conflicted about the idea that the US, or any other government, can hunt down and kill people in other sovereign countries--even if those people are demonstrably bad citizens of the world.
Don't get me wrong: part of me wanted Osama dead, just like a lot of other people wanted. But part of me doesn't think people should celebrate anybody's death by violence, and finds the whole thing tragic. Right now, those two parts of me aren't speaking to each other.
On the Publication of the Photos of their Mutilated Corpses
Some have chosen today
as a day of celebration—good
has thoroughly kicked the ugly ass of evil;
bombed the living shit out of the house where evil hid
for three months, waiting for a chance to run
for a dusty border.
When the walls had been well-reduced
to smoking, heaving rubble, good stormed in,
guns barking like rabid unclean hounds
and ripped holes in the body of evil,
as well as that of evil’s thirteen year old
son. And a bodyguard, presumably
also evil.
also evil.
Photos were taken
for publication so all the world
might smile or tremble as it chose
at the manifest evidence of the love
of one God or another
at work in the world.
But I am inexplicably sad—
perhaps perversely so—because
at the same time
at the same time
on the same block
of the same dusty town,
of the same dusty town,
the two derelict children of a derelict man
(raised on power divorced from responsibility,
broken and reglued
by a cruelty greater than their own
until they could not function except
as breakers themselves)
ran out of straws to grasp at,
were betrayed by a mercenary friend
who sensed a shifting of the wind,
and died
as they lived:
in a hail of shrieking metal
and the soft pop of flashbulbs.
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