Peter Dale SCOTT

A Poem: “Love the people not the government”

Peter Dale SCOTT [*. He 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. 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.]

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 understand¹
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 Afghanistan²

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 them³

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.⁴

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. newspapers⁵

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 Colorado⁶

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 language⁷

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 recorded⁸

or Carl Sandburg your Chicago
alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
a tall bold slugger set vivid
against the little soft cities⁹

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,¹⁰

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.¹¹

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 IDEA¹²

what Milosz achieved for Poland
when he translated Simone Weil¹³

into the language of his people
the unreasonable hating themselves

even more than they hate other nations¹⁴

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 propaganda¹⁵

and has sent a fleet
on its way to the Persian Gulf

with “bunker busters”
for blasting underground structures
aiming specifically at Iran¹⁶

Are we mentally obese?
why do most of us

barely mind or even notice
“They are gearing up totally
for the destruction of Iran”?¹⁷

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…¹⁸ 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 world¹⁹