Loving America
i
We are made schizophrenic
by loving America
by our love of the well-cherished
gardens of our comfortable neighborhoods
of the kind woman this morning
who rebuttoned my sleeve
after drawing blood from my arm
and told me that her friends
two Christian missionaries
had real problems in Afghanistan
–or near there —
perhaps it was Zimbabwe –
and the cultures of its people
as caught by Bernstein
in West Side Story
and the music of Leonard Cohen
Democracy is coming
to the U.S.A.
Love has problems with knowledge
which is why Dostoevsky said
he would choose Christ over the truth
and Milosz wrote in the midst
of the destruction of Warsaw
Who serves best doesn’t always understand Milosz New and Collected Poems 50
which is why for Socratics
love isn’t always a virtue
and because we love America
we tend to believe our president
it was only after
the Taliban refused
to turn over Osama bin Laden
we sent our troops into Afghanistan Obama, West Point 12/1/09
as we suppress what the Taliban
actually said:
they would not hand over bin Laden
without proof or evidence
that he was involved in last week’s attacks
which Bush refused them CNN 9/21/01
and we ignore the unpoetic truth
from FBI Headquarters
why its “Most Wanted” webpage on bin Laden
does not list 9/11
the FBI has no hard evidence
connecting Bin Laden to 9/11. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2623
or Cheney on TV
We’ve never argued the case
that somehow Osama Bin Laden
was directly involved in 9/11.
That evidence has never been forthcoming. Tony Snow Show, 3/29/06
and we ignore the fact
that America then recruited
high-level drug traffickers
from Pakistan and even France
to assist in the invasion it had already prepared
of Afghanistan
in the same way
that for more than half a century
our secret armies helped develop
Thailand Burma and Laos
to become for the first time
global opiate suppliers
in alliance with drug traffickers
so powerful and important
they are absolutely never named
in U.S. newspapers Scott American War Machine
like Li Wenhuan
General of the Fifth Army
in whose honor a huge statue is being built
we ignore whatever our papers ignore
and we suppress the obvious
because we are made schizophrenic
by loving America
while our country is delivered
into the hands of men
like the priapic
ex-senior officer of Enron
who cashed out for a quarter billion
married one of his strippers
and became the second largest
landowner in Colorado Mimi Swartz Power Failure 193
I don’t believe for a second
that what we think are our thoughts
are only the thoughts of our age
like those who proclaim
that it is language that controls us
and not we who control language Milosz Beginning with My Streets 204
we make our own culture
but not just as we choose
and we are bent way out of shape
when we struggle to lead
a virtuous life
in this freest
and most belligerent nation in the world
ii
so many of whose poets
once left the country
committed suicide went insane
play now in the gardens of their ivory towers
and the safely meaningless
or
have celebrated America’s power
as a country of vast designs and expectations
of a new and more excellent social state
than history has recorded Emerson, Sellers Market Revolution 380
or Carl Sandburg your Chicago
alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
a tall bold slugger set vivid
against the little soft cities Sandburg Chicago
or even you Walt Whitman
celebrating the guns of the new empire
and its Broadway pageants
the way we celebrate fireworks
I chant America, the Mistress—I chant a greater supremacy….
I chant my stars and stripes fluttering in the wind;
I chant commerce opening,
When the thunder-cracking guns arouse me
with the proud roar I love Whitman, “A Broadway Pageant” Leaves of Grass 101
and I have to say to my friends
who as I do love Whitman
you ignore the esoteric
you suppress the obvious
because we are made schizophrenic
by loving of America
iii
I saw it in fragments of a text
as in two shards of a mirror
that it is not we
who speak the language
but it is the language
that speaks us
and then nearby
We can express no more than
the language of our time and place
allows us to. Milosz Beginning with My Streets 161
In the wake of our civil war
when Whitman was attacked by Allen Tate
can there yet be a poet
with the breadth of compassion
to do for America
and Whitman’s fervid IDEA Whitman Democratic Vistas Complete Works935-6
what Milosz achieved for Poland
when he translated Simone Weil Scott Poets Who Grow Gardens in Their Heads
into the language of his people
the unreasonable hating themselves
even more than they hate other nations Milosz New and Collected poems 245
to persuade the militant church and the militant left
the factions of believers and thinkers
engaged in cultural wars
and increasingly self-deranged
by rejecting each other
that they could instead address
the heartlessness
at the center of the capital
conniving with lies and murder
as now in the case of Washington
which targeted a hospital in Fallujah
as “a center of propaganda” AsiaTimesOnline 11/10/2004, DahrJamilIraq.com 11/16/04
and has sent a fleet
on its way to the Persian Gulf
with “bunker busters”
for blasting underground structures
aiming specifically at Iran Chomsky July 2 2010
Are we mentally obese?
why do most of us
barely mind or even notice
“They are gearing up totally
for the destruction of Iran“? HeraldScotland March 14 2010
iv
Love America!
(means)
Love the people
not the government!
and don’t seriously blame anyone!
not the people
not those in Washington
not even the poets
though What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies… Milosz, New and Collected Poems, 77-78
we make our own culture
but not just as we please
and all are caught up in
a relentless dialectic
the two sides of Whitman
love of power and hatred of pain
which no poet can resolve
until America comes to realize
like Britain in 1956
it can no longer
control any situation in the world Joint Vision 2020 Pentagon
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He was born in Montreal in 1929, the only son of the poet F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Scott. He is married to Ronna Kabatznick; and he has three children, Cassie, Mika, and John Scott, by a previous marriage to Maylie Marshall.
His prose books include The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in collaboration, 1976), Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection (in collaboration, 1987), Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998), Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Deep Politics Two (1994, 1995, 2006), Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003), The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008).
An anti-war speaker during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, he was a co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA).
His poetry has dealt with both his experience and his research, the latter of which has centered on U.S. covert operations, their impact on democracy at home and abroad, and their relations to the John F. Kennedy assassination and the global drug traffic. The poet-critic Robert Hass has written (Agni, 31/32, p. 335) that “Coming to Jakarta is the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time.”
His latest book of poems, Mosaic Orpheus, appeared in 2009 from McGill-Queen’s University Press. It can be ordered from Amazon.com. His other chief poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000. In addition he has published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994), published in Canada as Murmur of the Stars. In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award.
Poetry and other websites are encouraged to repost this poem (with attribution to GlobalResearch.ca).
