Cover design by Martin Rowson for Words United by Michael Rosen
Last year Culture Matters published Words United by Michael Rosen, available here. This year we will be publishing another varied collection by Michael, called Words Out Loud. Profits from both books are being donated to Medical Aid for Palestine, which fights for the rights to dignity and health of millions of Palestinians living under Israel’s brutal and illegal military occupation.
Below is a poem from the new book.
Words of Sympathy
By Michael Rosen
I don’t usually have words of sympathy
for the blather-mongers and commentary-trundlers
who crawl all over the world’s political shenanigans.
They fill hours and hours of screen time
guessing and divining and predicting
in such a way as to confirm that
the world is really being run for our benefit,
rather than for the bunch of megalomaniacs, gangsters, crooks, racketeers and perverts
who are in charge.
We’re supposed to nod on
thinking that, well, it’ll all work out OK
in the end, I suppose.
They hold up in front of us devils and demons
who we are supposed to believe are
much, much, much worse than
our beloved leaders.
The mass deaths caused by our guys
are nicer than the mass deaths caused
by the devils and demons.
Apparently.
But this last couple of weeks,
raised a flicker of sympathy in me
for the commentators.
They’ve had to find words to explain Trump.
They’ve noticed that he’s not like the others.
When he says that he’s going into Venezuela,
he doesn’t fluff it up with candy floss
claiming it’s all for democracy.
He says it’s for the oil.
In fact, you can catch him on film,
interrupting Vance
while Vance is saying it’s for democracy,
and Trump says, ‘And the oil.’
NO TRUMP, you’re not supposed to say those words.
Now he’s created his own United Nations,
with him at the top.
This breaks all the rules.
The UN was useful
in that its baroque structures could mostly
allow big powers to do
whatever they want to do
(see Vietnam, Iraq War),
while giving it the shine of legality.
(I’m never sure who believes this bs,
but they do it all the same.)
Now Trump decides
that even the UN doesn’t give the US
enough cover,
so he just creates his own UN.
It breaks all the rules.
And the poor journalists
don’t know what words to use.
They know that it breaks the rules.
They know this is beyond absurd.
But as long as they’re speaking
from the platforms of the mass media,
they can’t turn to us and say,
‘What’s going on is a new kind of crazy’.
They have to couch it in discreet terms
like ‘he’s playing to new rules’
or ‘he’s upsetting the apple cart’…
But it’s way, way beyond that.
This is taking political gangsterism
to the heart of world government.
It’s only the comedians and satirists
who can get a full hold on this stuff.
They’re not bound
by the same reins and harnesses
of the political shows and programmes.
And it’s probably only satire
that can express the enormity of it all,
find the analogies,
that alert us to how the world has changed.
Ultimately, the only thing that can slow
or halt this express train
into mass death and anarchy
is when people on the ground
find the words and the ways
to stop it happening.
Something big is going on in Minnesota.
ICE is not really much different
from the Nazis’ stormtroopers.
Trump is in danger of arousing
two very different constituencies:
a liberal tendency to resist state totalitarian power,
and an anti-federal
(often thought of as right-wing)
tendency that doesn’t like the idea
of the ‘feds’ turning up on their streets.
I’ve no idea whether that might or might not coalesce.
One side to the absurdity
is the sight of liberal journalists
hoping that centre-right politicians
will ‘stand up to’ what’s going on
when mostly Trump and his allies
make mincemeat of them.
Every time they raise an objection,
Trump says, in effect,
‘And you lot are up to your eyes
in this shit too.’
That’s probably why the Epstein revelations
have ground to a halt.
After all, wind back thirty or forty years
and imagine what politicians could possibly
have survived even the whispers
about the kind of stuff Trump
and other major politicians have wallowed about in.
Again, what do we get from the commentators?
They can’t or won’t say what they know.
They can’t find the words
can’t get to their mikes
and express outrage and disgust
at what happened.
They talk in muted terms of
redacted files and possible lawsuits.
Once again, we are supposed to think,
it’ll be alright in the end.
It’ll be OK.
G’night.
