This photo provided by the Dechen family shows Lance Cpl. Kurt Dechen in an undated photo. The Marine reservist from Springfield, Vt., was shot and killed Thursday, Aug. 4, 2006, during combat in Iraq's Anbar Province. Dechen was in the Marine Reserves with the 1st Battalion 25th Marines 'C' Company out of Plainville, Conn.
(AP Photo/Dechen family)

An Iraqi father mourns at a local morgue for his two sons, Mohammed, 16, and Ahmed, 18, killed in the previous day's bomb attacks on a soccer field, Thursday, Aug. 3, 2006, in Baghdad, Iraq. The two homemade bombs went off Wednesday afternoon on the soccer field in the mostly Shiite district of Amil in west Baghdad, killing both players and spectators ranging in age from 15 to 25, police 1st Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said.
(AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

Schema
by Richard Greenfield  

In the field of traumas come the base savannas--crosshairs tighten
on the flaring pink of the evening.

Recognize the world. After the bit of blue, after a window opened
to air and the portioned stereo of love and grandeur, after--

mother sews a fell-off button, heats a stew, sews at the factory,
re-stews, tires, starts (again),

father shortens a barrel, leans blast-weapons beneath windows,
stacks ammo with scream and apocalypse.

Under cover, you are dead behind the couch when they knock.

From the first, in the glossed-over city where none reprimand
violence, the palms executed along the auto avenues thrive--
a pitch-staggered procession in white-painted trunks.

The memoir has shown how bitter and relentless is the rind--
privacy flowers pubescent, hopeful to outlast time.

Traffic flows or stops on elevated structures in denial of the seven-
point-two,

and in the aftermath of advertising, children wander the highway in
search of litter.

The citizens are trembling among the trembling.

Against the green strip--against the urbane and its expansion into
the continent, the boulevard is the last boundary between the sky
and the low-lying building,

though it is too accomplished among the rest of the wreckage.

They have their memories. The trigger is set on annihilation.
- - -

The wartime tax cuts and the all-volunteer, wartime army are simply the latest manifestations of a trend that is now decades old and that has been promulgated through peace as well as war, by Democrats as well as Republicans. It cannot truly be a surprise that a society that has steadily dismantled or diminished the most basic access to health care, relief for the poor and the aged, and decent education; a society that has allowed the gap between its richest and poorest citizens to grow to unprecedented size; a society that has paid obeisance to the ideology of globalization to the point of giving away both its jobs and its debt to foreign nations, and which has just allowed one of its poorer cities to quietly drown, should choose to largely opt out of its own defense.

Anyone who doubts that this is exactly what we have done need only look at how little the war really engages most of us. It rarely draws more than a few seconds of coverage on the local television news, if that, and then only well into the broadcast, after a story on a murder, or a fire, or the latest weather predictions. Even the largest and angriest demonstrations against our occupation of Iraq have not approached the mobilizations against the war in Vietnam, but a close observer will notice that we also have yet to see any of the massive counterdemonstrations that were held in support of that war--or "in support of the troops." Such engagement on either side seems almost quaint now.

from Stabbed in the Back!
The past and future of a right-wing myth
Posted on Friday, July 14, 2006.
Originally from June 2006.
By Kevin Baker.

Thanks to The Baculum King