I so want to be optimistic and airy, to write of
our generous spirit, to wax poetic about moon landings
and beach landings, entrepreneurship, sliced bread,
the assembly line, the World Wide Web. It feels un-American
I hire the police that protect my home from the hordes
that would tax me: I need nothing from the state, and so
give nothing to the state.
I hope it’s not too late to stop the carnage.
America forgives itself so easily, as
though we weren’t forgiving but forgetting.
“How does one with no boots
pull himself up by his bootstraps?”
“Why teach someone to fish
then deny them access to the lake?”
I have lingered too long on the intricacies of bark and root,
of trees as leap into the inverted bowl of a sky I cannot lick,
named comets and coined mythologies while the masters
of commerce discussed business in the other room.
Just as with hurricanes, poverty, terrorism, and all those other “isms” that bedevil mankind, the answer to COVID-19 is to increase military spending and cut taxes.
On June 13, 2016–right in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections in American history–“an American-born man who’d pledged allegiance to ISIS gunned down 49 people…at a gay nightclub in Orlando.” The Pulse Nightclub shooting was, at […]
The speed with which the COVID-19 pandemic has completely upended and shut down ordinary life in America is both stunning and terrifying.
I am a wealthy god who cares about the poor.
I’ve built them shopping malls to worship me,
paid for stained-glass windows to let in a little light
filtered in my image, crafted search engines to ask
for things I am too wise to give away:
Trump now thinks he is a king, acts like a king, and is deferred to by the Republican Party as though he were a king