Dictatorship, American Style

There is a specter falling over America. A menace. The man elected by fluke is a fake. A fraudulent populist who lost the popular vote. A stuffed, hollow man who inhales Hannity and exhales something Hitlerian. A miasma has spread over the heartland. He stumps and harrumphs stirring the brew and serving the grapes of wrath from a poisoned cup.

He has trampled on Madison, Hamilton and Jefferson whether by ignorance or malice. We are witness to a usurpation of power. An overthrow of the justice system. The high court is stacked. Congress has been bought and bamboozled. The Brothers Koch are the American version of the family Krupp.

The man who would be king doesn’t look toward the Constitution. He looks to the Hapsburgs, Bourbons and the Czars, particularly to the present one. He demands flattery and fealty. He rules by privileged breeding. By superlatives and decrees.

He crushes the opposition with his infantile vocabulary speaking in two voices: a soporific drone read from a teleprompter or a petulant chirp-blurt in fluent locker-room language revealing an arrested development. He is insipid, naked of compassion and humanity. His mind is open like a sieve, all ideas falling through. His mouth is open at all times to celebrate himself. The emperor has no close.

Without a trace of nobility, our monarch rules from his throne of a golden toilet seat in Versailles Tower high above 5^th Ave. Below are burst bubbles, a wreckage of deported hopes and dreams. America has taken a knee. The shambles of our precepts are unrecognizable to our Founders. The inscription on Lady Liberty gurgles under water.

One day Mar-a-Lago, literally from sea to lake, with its thirty-three bathrooms, will also be submerged under a rising ocean. The bloated billionaire ship of state will run aground like a beached whale. New wind will pass through the bones and the poet’s voice will emerge making an Aeolian harp* of the harpooned Leviathan... strung with Donald's corn-husked hair. It will beat to the rhythm of the Imperial President pacing back and forth and Robert Mueller’s gavel.

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       *Robert Graves from his Collected Talks and Essays On Poetry