“Black voters do not support the Republican Party
because conservatives have never supported them.
--Leonard Pitts Jr.

i.

talking politics in the south
is just like racist whispers
in the north you have to
always be wary that
someone might overhear

and that is why poems are
not supposed to be political
they should be about
bigger things less petty
things the kind of things
that matter for all time
but even when a poem achieves
those lofty goals it can never
escape its own politics

this is not because
those politics are on
the wrong side but rather
because absence of politics
is merely an illusion
politics are always invisible
when they are yours

and in our society
that tends to mean that
when something is devoid
of politics it only means
that it simply a product
of a conservative politics



ii.

we are told it’s
all because they
hate our freedoms
and so we must
go over there
to fight for them

while back at home
we silently sit back
seemingly unaware
that as we are winning
freedom for a country
that doesn’t want any
part of our version
of liberty or justice
we are not interested
in fighting for them

and all around us
the media are merging
and the schools are
standardizing and all
the messages that shape
our consciousness are
becoming progressively
increasingly homogenized

and we fail to realize that
this new figure of patriotism
is an almost systemic process
where faith and factoids
tease us out of thought

our teachers are being
taught what to think and
what to teach instead of
how to think and how to
teach students to think

our talking heads are
becoming one voice
increasingly seeming
like an american pravda
carefully constructing our
collective consciousness



iii.

a good friend once
argued that everyone
in the bush administration
had read their foucault
of course they had he said
vehemently arguing that
they were intimately
familiar with foucault’s
important work on
social discourse and
the prison-panopticon

another friend once
suggested that southerners
are very much entrenched
in an enlightenment ideology
and while i've always agreed
i'm not so sure that the same
isn’t true for most americans
when we consider the timeless
power of our jeffersonian ideals

and yet it would also seem
that the modernist constructs
of hegemony and ideology as
false consciousnesses of control
are still very much in play here
however the more subtly
sophisticated foucauldian notions
of power and the shaping forces
of discourse would not be likely
to flourish if for no other reason
than we would want to reject
their frenchness for freedom

plus i could never quite believe
that the current administration
and its outdated metaphysics
and conceptions of truth
could ever accept or employ
such a postmodern philosophy
into the design machination
and dominion of its policy

besides bush wouldn’t know
how to pronounce foucault
if it were boldly brought
before him all spelled out



iv.

there used to be a
myth of the melting pot
where all americans
of various nationalities
and cultures would
come together as one
america
but then the new
concoction began
to darken and some
groups couldn’t melt
at all so we changed
our minds and went in
search of a new metaphor

first we tried a tapestry
and then found that a quilt
seemed more democratic
and more genuinely
american
but for some reason
it just didn’t catch on
so we had to settle
on a salad bowl
a rich and diverse
combination of flavors
bound together with
a nice rich ranch dressing

but now we’ve
decided it is better
to be color blind
to fail to see or
at least deny seeing
any difference at all
which is an interesting
return to the melting pot
a brilliant attempt
at a mystical alchemy
that will bind all together
in an alloy of ideology
all in a blind hope
that if we include
the entire spectrum
all the colors combined
together will hopefully
somehow still shine white