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September 12
The formative years of our adolescence were marked by hopelessness,
By anonymous and unknown conspirators,
Of undertakings of greed,
Pointless manifestations of power,
And barbarity.
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We saw the loss of our culture to maniacal idealogues,
And our voices lost to crazed demagogues,
Who sold fear in a nickelbag,
We saw our own gather in the streets to say what they couldn’t say at home or on the TV,
We saw prized college youths driven to radicalism,
Kids bent out on dope and Benzedrine to fulfill fantasies lost to rampant numeric anonymous consignment to work as scripted machinery in retail shops and factory warehouses,
We saw creative dissonance burnt out by product marketing
And artistic brilliance now only worthy of advertising jingles
We saw the counterculture co-oped by pop culture,
And the faithful driven underground,
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It was the corporate crony talking heads,
It was the Project for the New American Century,
It was behind closed doors,
It was unctuous stockbrokers with slippery palms, slick pockets, slim suits and big briefcases,
It was Kenny Boy Lay
It was Enron,
It was Alberto Gonzales with a hangman’s noose for a necktie and a knife for a pen,
And we could envision his smiling as a soldier rammed a plunger up a refugee’s rectum,
It was the fat cats at Halliburton,
It was Slick Dick Cheney run by a hell-bent pacemaker,
It was planned
And it was outright,
It was complicit and conspired,
The arms makers and oil producers were in cahoots,
The lawmakers and pharmaceuticals,
Padded their pockets and their consciences,
And took a vacation to take their minds off of the egregious deaths
Lost to patent laws
And Exxon-Mobil became Exxon-Mobil-BP-Amoco-Shell,
Competitors in cahoots,
The construction industry and morticians were in cahoots,
And no business was a good as the business of war.
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It was in the church,
And it was on the marquis,
It was delivered from the altar,
And from the hip,
It was on Wall Street,
On K Street
And it was on Main Street,
It was white America,
It was ex-urbia,
It was blind men
Blind ladies,
It was 20 year old vets with sawed off legs and mangled spines,
It was poor urban kids with scorched faces and cut paychecks
It was smoked carcasses looking like blackened Cajun chicken,
It was crosscut saws
It was maquiladoras
It was opportunist smug-faced college grads,
It was in the basements
And on school buses
It was in the shopping malls
It was Plan Colombia,
Plan de Muerte
It was the drug trade financed by arm sales and government paychecks,
It was crack sold to poor inner city youth in the name of liberal democracy and free market capitalism,
It was laundered world-wide through illicit criminal networks,
It was Drug lords smiling like sambo dolls,
Militarized Crop Dusters, burying banana groves and olive tree orchards,
As We watched our Caterpillars numbly raze newlywed Palestinian’s homes
And introduced ourselves through insignia on empty missile shells and Apache attack helicopters
It was Bill Clinton slyly walking out of a failed peace summit with a new military contract
It was the herding of refugees into ghettos like sheep into pens,
Outposts on the bank of the Western frontier,
It was our relentless, pathetic advocacy of the plight of the indigenous lost to one sweep of a pen,
Hello to the new world order
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It was September 12th
It was Dearborn, MI looking like a ghost town
It was this kid too afraid to leave the classroom,
It was los desparecidos (the disappeared) vanishing from dinner tables and their middle class neighborhoods, Who needs internment camps when you have jail cells?
It was complacence
Lone-hearted avarice
Guilty consciences
Newly-purchased innocence
Moral insulation
Deregulation
Ill-fated censorship
Cronyism
Texan patronage
Neocolonialism
The downward race
Orientalism
Evangelical Imperialism
Patriotantagonism
The ever present capitalism
And the new world order
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Terrorism and Imperialism are one mind,
Violence, Intimidation and Dogma
Violence, Intimidation and Dogma
Violence, Intimidation and Dogma
Violence, Intimidation and Dogma Violence, Intimidation and Dogma
Trent is a rising senior in CCAS. He is majoring in Spanish Language and Literature and Political Science. He is also a member of ThinkTank Revolution. His favorite writers are Allen Ginsberg, Fydor Doestevsky, Ralph Ellison, Nicanor Parra and Jorge Luis Borges.
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