© August 13, 2021, the Griot Poet
“You will never defeat our poverty,”
A Bedouin tribal chieftain said,
To Alexander the Great,
The first western power
Attempting to control the area near
The Hindu-Kush mountains,
He led the [greatest] fighting force in existence,
Wept when he thought,
There were no more worlds to conquer,
He could not resist the challenge,
Put down by a Bedouin,
Alexander had battering rams and catapults;
The chieftain knew the mountainous terrain,
His warriors had courage and heart,
Spears, arrows, and slingshots,
Guess who won?
Rumi, the experimental poet, and Sufi master, actually,
Conquered Afghanistan with words of harmony,
Overcame ignorance without firing a shot,
Part of a succession,
Of western powers,
That saw defeat,
Their kryptonite being
Abject stupidity and arrogance,
The British Empire tried three times before us,
The USA,
Is addicted to “winning,”
Starting with the Revolutionary War,
Robert E. Lee surrendered,
To Ulysses S. Grant,
At Appomattox,
We got through the War of 1812,
The other time
Adversaries stormed the Capitol,
The War to End All Wars,
Resulting in the League of Nations,
Preceded the United Nations,
And World War II,
After Fat Man and Big Boy,
Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
A sailor and a damsel’s kiss,
In Times Square,
Immortalized on Life Magazine,
We were invincible!
Then came South Korea,
Technically, in armistice since the 1950s,
So, you can’t say we “lost” a war,
That technically,
[Hasn’t] really ended,
On the heels of this,
Indochina,
Known popularly as Vietnam,
Images of helicopters,
Evacuating,
Ho Chi Min City,
Replication,
Thirty-six years later,
Near the grave of a smiling Bedouin,
Osama bin Laden took ideological guidance from Ibn Taymiyya,
Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, and Sayyid Qutb.
He subscribed to the Athari (literalist) school of Islamic
theology.
We have American y’all Qaeda zealot analogies,
Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Post our obvious defeat in Vietnam,
Suggested to President Carter,
To let the Soviet Union have a taste,
They slogged it out nine years,
Until their economy collapsed,
No western power has ever defeated their poverty,
The Taliban existed,
Before we entered to get Osama Bin Laden,
After 9/11,
Whom THEY offered,
Along with terms of THEIR surrender,
Meaning: we didn’t have to go get him,
We lost talent, lives, and treasure,
How many flag-draped coffins could we have avoided?
Fighting an unnecessary war,
Trillions of dollars spent,
Potholes and bridges still needing repair,
Free college, and universal healthcare,
Instead, this dysfunctional dystopia of despair,
Guantanamo would not exist,
Except for sadism and arrogance,
The Pentagon budget,
Which never gets cut,
Is greater than,
The combined equivalent,
Of twelve other western nations,
Rome fell,
When the empire,
Overextended,
Itself,
It’s why we study about it in museums,
Shakespeare penned “Julius Caesar,”
It is arrogant to believe,
We don’t have a time limit,
Homo sapiens is supposed to mean “wise men,”
“American exceptionalism” is a façade for bullshit,
We behave more like Homo Stultus, “stupid men,”
We “will never defeat their poverty,”
It sounds like a law of physics,
As inexorable as,
The Second Law of Thermodynamics,
Order without maintenance,
Eventually goes into chaos,
Overextended empires eventually collapse,
Sadly, we don’t recall George Santayana’s wisdom,
Or heed it:
“Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
