Loving America
A Poem: "Love the people not the government"


By Peter Dale Scott

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20394

Global Research, July 31, 2010


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