Republican congressman at “Scandalgate” hearing 2013

Lost in the daily revelations of exploding “Scandalgate”
the three ring political circus of protracted congressional overreach
the partisan Kabuki death dance that distracts from the larger pattern
of systemic failure growing all around or as my reading from the I Ching
the patriarchal Chinese book of changes said this morning when again I knew
                    Return: (the Turning Point)
     Six at the top means: Missing the Return Misfortune
     Misfortune from within and without
     If armies are set marching in this way
     One will in the end suffer great defeat
     Disastrous for the ruler of the country
     For ten years
     It will not be possible to attack again.
And there it all is again over a long tortured decade of murder
and enhanced interrogation like value meals or extra added vita-mins
one scandal after another over the long, long years one after the other
the Supreme Court coup, the President select, the selection elections,
deletion voter rolls, leaching voter polls, elect select, select elect the elect
so what’s a few scandals at Benghazi IRS and Justice what could they have to do
with anything except the most recent elect, the President who went along so
          nice
with all the war crimes and global fraud in fact continued all the prosecutions
of the previous whistleblowers and leftist activists and quietly accepted
that the crimes of the coup were to be just left behind so we all could now
“move on” and keep “looking forward” and never ever “look back”
at the road kill thrown out from under the wheels bouncing off the hood
and oh, yes inside the boat full of bullet holes scribbled in ball point pen
a message from the mad bomber with a name like the Joker telling us
he did it because of “Iraq and Afghanistan” so once again we are all
          “collateral damage”
to endless war with its forever terrorism the Great Terror War called War on
          Terrorism
strikes again and again spreading instability supported by ongoing financial
          fraud
nations disintegrate, whole regions collapse, the super storms swirl, the ice
          sheets melt
the climate changes, species go extinct, but now on Capitol Hill they gird them
          selves
for hearings and talk of Watergate and Iran-contra (oh, but not the Army-
          McCarthy
hearings or Whitewater, Vince Foster or Monica) while millions are out of work
          and
more millions still going through foreclosure and huge portions of the global
          economy
goes into recession again, Europe and China both struggling in the financial
          vortex
5 years after the meltdown and still no real recovery but they’re talking of
          impeaching
the president as they wonder what they can do with the reputation of the
          president
who should have been impeached and convicted before the present president
and what a bunch of war criminals what a bunch of phony frauds the more they
micro-manipulate the more they attempt to control the more out of control it
          becomes
but that’s all right because the inevitable consequences justify the next new set
          of
violent military solutions where the ambassador killed by the militant jihadists
in a C.I.A. station that was “working with” his killers just days before the Chechen boys
we gave political asylum to as we invaded Afghanistan and prepared to invade
          Iraq
end up exploding pressure cooker fragmentation bombs because of our own
          disastrous
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan as our government taken over by
          international
corporate capital reels from one scandal to the next in one department after
          another
funny how it all happens ALL ONE THING all at one time just one ongoing
          Scandalgate.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.