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© January 30, 2021, the Griot Poet
MAUS is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman.
A thick comic book for the rest of us,
It is the only graphic novel ever to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Tennessee’s school board voted ten to zero,
Raising a big fuss
To ban it.
Because it’s banned: I bought it!
Why?
It artfully combines postmortem schemes:
Jews are mice,
Nazis are cats,
Poles are pigs,
Americans are dogs,
The English are fish,
To complete the list,
The French are frogs,
The Swedish are deer.
Have they never heard of
George Orwell’s allegorical novella “Animal Farm?”
The animals rebelled against humanity,
Overthrowing their tyranny,
Trying to set up an egalitarian society,
Only to find their quest for animal utopia,
Thwarted by the maniacal dreams of the pig, Napoleon,
Who, in a moment before Twitter,
To quote the novella,
Foreshadowed “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Children who read MAUS,
They are not likely to grow up into adults that compares every
inconvenience,
Or, offenses of their privilege to being accused of being
Nazis,
Children who read MAUS,
They are not likely to grow up into narcissistic sociopaths,
Drooling over Ann Coulter and Ayn Rand figuratively,
Their [own] daughter, literally,
Think that Rush Limbaugh was a genius,
Tarnishing the Medal of Freedom forever,
That they were [“smart”] to listen to him,
While he daily called them dummies and “ditto heads.”
(“We love the poorly educated!”)
Fascism likes to control information,
And goes to war with education,
Knowledge is the power to reject indoctrination,
To question authorities obligated,
To follow the constitutions of their governments,
“Practice what you preach” about democratic republics,
Passing the stars and bars ensign
Of the original insurrectionists,
In a state that reserves the right of secession,
The failed, fake real estate, faux billionaire,
And the loser of the 2020 election contest,
Promised to pardon feces-stamping insurrectionists,
Promised nationwide mob violence,
The moment his enemies follow The Constitution,
And he ends up indicted,
Fulton County DA Fani Lewis,
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg,
(Successor to Cy Vance)
January 6th Chair Congressman Bennie Thompson,
New York Attorney General Letitia James,
Calling them “racist” in Conroe, Texas
At what amounts to a Ku Klux Klan rally,
Except for the well-placed, photogenic brown trolls on his payroll
tally,
By the Orange Satan fascist,
Who, they all might as well be wearing
T-shirts saying:
"Chickens for Colonel Sanders!"
"Lobsters for fishermen!"
"Snails for salt!"
Each will have a similar demise by default,
Knowing that his remarks would incite peak racism,
Because all of the lawmakers seeking justice for his
continuous crime spree,
Happen to be African Americans,
(Emphasis, Moscow Mitch, on the “Americans” part),
[This] is OMERTÀ: the Mafia “code of silence.”
Don’t rat me out; I’ll pardon you all,
And together, we can destroy the country and the planet.
Do you smell the embers of the next insurrection?
Does anyone have the Twitter handle of Merrick Garland?
[This] is classic stochastic terrorism,
He’s inciting the next rebellion,
The blueprint [given] to him in those off-the-books meetings,
With KGB spymaster Vladimir Putin.
The insurrectionists are banning books,
About Civil Rights, women’s rights, LGBT issues, and actual
history,
Because ultimately,
They are conserving white male, cisgender supremacy,
The “bliss of ignorance” is their only commandment,
Thomas Gray’s poem, “Ode on a Distant Prospect at Eton
College,” wasn’t meant for this,
The insurrectionists are banning books,
Yet, not a single ban on high-capacity assault weapons,
The United States is a killing field,
Since Charles Whitman at the UT Austin Clock Tower shooting,
Since Columbine High School in Colorado and Sandy Hook
Elementary in Connecticut,
We’ve expanded to Walmart malls in El Paso,
Sikh temples in Wisconson, and Jewish synagogues in Pennsylvania,
in this country,
And the "make murder legal," racist Senate Bill 666 in Minnesota,
The Nazis BURNED books: you ban them.
“Dear Martin” by Nic Stone was banned in North Carolina,
And replaced with “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee,
Because “Martin” uses the word “fuck,”
But “Mockingbird” uses the N-word (no big!). I bought them
both!
The Nazis killed Jews, poets, gypsies, scientists; the LGBT,
Russia is doing similar things in the 21st Century,
You want a modern version of “Damnatio Ignatoraie,”
“Condemnation of memory” is oblivion without assassination,
A bloodless coup of society’s insignificant,
It is a concession of the marginalized to the shadows of
indifference,
The Nazis had brown shirts, Kristalnaught, and the SS,
You have a leader who thinks Nazis are “very fine people,
You have MAGA cultists, Oath Keepers, Vaccine Deniers, Proud
Boys, Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, and feces-trampling insurrectionists!
Dr. Maya Angelou said, “when someone shows you who they are
the first time, believe them.”
William Shakespeare said, “past is prologue.”
Speaking of “fuck,” didn’t you t-shirt “fuck your
feelings?”
If you don't like the country's past history,
Santayana said, learn from our mistakes, so we WON'T repeat them,
If you “snowflake out” and say that
Your feelings are hurt now, and
You don’t want to be called Nazis,
Here’s a thought: STOP acting like them!
