#400

Four hundred! Wow. Hope to hit five hundred this year. Part of taking a shot at that that will entail writing a post every day this month, in lieu of the traditional thirty April poems produced by hobbyists and serious heads alike here in the U.S. 

I've done it maybe once. It becomes easy to stop caring after fifteen fresh poems. That's like...a fucking ton of poems, which may represent years of rewrites and tweaks. Doubling down seems like it might be a waste of energy. But then, some people love to fill a number. I can dig it, but need a motivational context to get me to the end of things. 

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Upon firing up what I consider on a technicality to be the "safest" news website today, I saw that "1 in 5 Americans think violence may solve the current political divisions". And I'm like, why would you share this information this way? You must know by now that saying the results of polls in a headline like that is tantamount to declaring it the most conservative version of a testable fact, one with a decent chance of having a much more dangerous number attached.

Who the fuck are we trying to help here? You know it's not true. So why? What the fuck!

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And I mean, reading the article--I'm honestly disappointed. Cloaked in the justification of the need to inform based on the rising threat of authoritarianism. Committed to the form that states one must act as though the polled are equal to the whole, even analogous, when the poll is the merest of suggestions. Finally, the quotes from the featured expert or whatever you want to call the motherfucker on the other end of the phone call--I mean, look.

First of all, I am firmly of the opinion that if violence could solve the divides present in American society, it would have fucking solved them by now. This country swims in an apple's depth of blood from coast to fucking coast. Get real. Violence cannot solve our problem because it is our problem, one we import internally and export to the world. 

So to say that “Regardless of your politics, the idea of breaking rules and engaging in violence is just antithetical to the idea of America,” as stated by some dude named McQuade, is wrong on the former basis. Further, well, sorry to tell you this, old boy, but those so-called proud patriot motherfuckers have one thing entirely and completely correct: breaking rules and engaging in violence is how this country got born and made. A legal accompaniment was gilded onto the lily of open and totally selfish revolt by grace of manners and the efforts of one John Adams, who had the wit to (eventually) comprehend that the talk was only essential because the thing itself was absolutely going to happen. The rest of it was mutilating tax collectors and causing hundreds of thousands of pounds of property damage and tax evasion--something that maybe we need to come back to, in this day and age? As stated, no. But to say that moments and attitudes like these are not the crux of the matter is to misundersand what the problem is in the first place.

Accepting illegal and outrageous events and ideas as normal is the mechanism by which authoritarian states maintain psychological strangleholds over subject populations. The project of the United States has always included accepting such premises in order to conduct its internal affairs. The promise of safey and the threat of violence, the sacrifice of freedom in the name of order in the name of freedom, the justifications for slavery, all that other 1984 shit plus "fuck you, got mine--and sit your ass down--I'm gettin me some more" has been a part of American ideation and expansion since day one. 

So you are helping the wrong forces in this teetering society when you put "1 in 5 Americans etc." right next to a headline about like allied war crimes and another about how a rapper does sex trafficking. The whole thing turns into a vortex of fucking nonsense and the reader is made to feel increasingly untethered to functional and actionable information.

It would go a long way to say "selective polls representing less than a fraction of a percent of the total population show that twenty percent of Americans polled may be open to choosing some form of political violence over political dialogue and compromise--at least, they were willing to say so." Not snappy? Too fucking bad, man. When that's actually what you're talking about--not "every fifth person might want to shoot you with a gun", which I know you know is how your grabby little headline sounds and makes people feel in that moment--that's how you have to sound. Informative. Representative of your tools and the limitations they come with.

How can you make my version snappy? The problem is, you can't--not without revealing that YOU DON'T HAVE A FUCKING STORY. Jesus fucking wept. Best-case scenario, you could talk about how that's more than it used to be and is still very dangerous, which is fine and true. 

Believe me, I know shit is bad. I've been here before. The beautiful irony of fleeing to America to avoid internecine violence and oppressive government. You have one job, which is not to make it worse, and you fucking did the opposite, have been, since we had presidents, back in the Mexican-American and the Spanish-American wars, whenever you had to justify atrocities to keep your sponsors happy, etc. Fail. Fail state. You are all failing. Turn the ship around. Have some dignity.

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Fuck man. Shit really is grim. 

Oh well! Invest in potable water, dry and canned goods, and surplus linens. That's my advice. Basic, believable, and useful even if everything simmers right down.

--JL