Donald Rumsfeld's Romp

A poem from the forthcoming collection 'red, white, and blues'

red, white, and blues is the fourth installment of a large, ongoing project acclaimed artist Matthew Shipp describes as “a kaleidoscopic, deep, and opulent journey.” Once more, I’m exploring America and its mythology through a series of poems that function as biography, history, and cultural commentary. Where the previous collections interrogated these concerns primarily through the lens of jazz and blues musicians, these poems home in on politics—and key players who have shaped our shared culture. A moral cross-examination covering history, war, religion, and pop spectacle, this collection asks what we worship, what we excuse, and what the stories we tell do to us.

I wrote red, white, and blues because I believe poetry can still tell the truth when other forms have failed us. These poems are not interested in neutrality; they are interested in clarity. They move through history and pop culture because that is where our myths live—where power learns to hide and where harm learns to look inevitable. (I also have come to believe poetry is the best way to mash up history, media, political commentary, and provides a succinct formula for connecting dots in ways Op-Eds, fiction, and social media grandstanding can’t and won’t). I wanted to write a book that names what we worship, what we excuse, and what we leave behind, while still honoring the strange, stubborn beauty that survives in language. If these poems bruise, I hope they also invite conversation. If they provoke, I hope they also connect. Art matters because it reminds us that we are not alone in our witnessing.

These poems are political, name names, and while I don’t have any illusions my modest efforts can affect the type of meaningful change we desperately need, it’s a flag flown in solidarity, and a middle finger to the establishment. As such, I think it’s coming into the world at the right time—and perhaps can inspire some dialogue or instigate something positive.

It’s at once more difficult and more satisfying to try and nail down a scumbag like Jeff Bezos and capture his essence, in less than one page, than it is to write dozens of impassioned, ultimately ineffectual and instantly dated Op-Eds. Hence what I’m trying to accomplish with this poetic project. Whether my modest efforts make the slightest difference matters less to me than the fact that this poem will be relevant and applicable one year, ten years, one hundred years from now. When the buffoon that’s helping wreck the planet is a gross footnote to an era when America was at its worst, and some of the sickest people who ever shared oxygen with other human beings ruled the world. Like Ozymandias, their time was brief, the damage significant, and their example used as cautionary tale.

Donald Rumsfeld’s Romp*

Of course, we all saw the same images

and felt sickened, as any sensible person

would be by a display of such belligerence

and depravity; whatever always happens

when there’s too much power and a void

of supervision, the way goldfish allegedly

will eat themselves to death if indulged

by a child who doesn’t know any better.

*

But some of us saw something else, seeing

the photos of these young American soldiers

leading naked men around like docile dogs

(and the fear in their eyes, the money shot

every fascist impulse craves, to not only terrify

but humiliate—this is what can impel humans

to consider strangers from their same species

mere insects, something to be exterminated).

*

Some also saw the complacent certainty shared

by the architects of this fiasco, cocksure men

promising they will welcome us as liberators,

again stirring the scarcely-cooled cauldron

of indignity, sounding a familiar call to arms

and sending fresh soldiers overseas—to finish

what they didn’t start so much as immortalize,

that eternal grievance measured in blood and oil.

*

(*On April 30, 2004, the CBS program 60 Minutes reports on abuse of

prisoners by American military forces at Abu Ghraib, a prison in Iraq.

Photographs depicted American soldiers sexually assaulting detainees,

threatening them with dogs, putting them on leashes and engaging in a

number of other practices that clearly constituted torture and/or violations

of the Geneva Convention.)