Confession...

 

© April 15, 2024, the Griot Poet

 

Source: https://www.britannica.com/technology/thermonuclear-bomb

 

September 15, 2001, was a Saturday.

We were all still reeling from the attacks on the Twin Towers that no longer existed,

The Pentagon had a sizable hole in it,

Every news outlet had “theme music,”

As pundits pontificated about Flight 93’s purpose when some “Let’s Roll” brave souls scuttled it.

 

“Pop, isn’t that where you went to school?”

 

My youngest son said it.

His older brother was at Prairie View, trying to figure it out.

We were in H-E-B getting groceries,

Before me, on the shelf,

On the top fold of the Austin American Statesman,

There was a photo of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, my classmate.

Under the caption of his photo was where he went to pursue his Mechanical Engineering degree:

North Carolina A&T State University.

The largest HBCU in the country and our Alma Mater.

 

Khalid and I were STEM majors,

He was in Mechanical Engineering, I was in Engineering Physics,

I was in my senior year, and he was a transfer student.

[And] we were taking a graduate-level course in Nuclear Physics.

The course was taught by Dr. Amin Haque (may he rest in peace),

Who explained that the reason why we were taking this upper-division course was to ensure the country had enough STEM students to manufacture thermonuclear weapons in case of a war with Russia.

 

“Who would SURVIVE a first exchange to manufacture ANYTHING?” I thought.

I kept my concerns mum.

I have since realized that the government used a competitive, captive audience of STEM students working on the same issue across the country, HBCUs, and PWIs, a youthful “think tank” with no salary.

 

Khalid and I were as different as two people could be,

 

He was a child of wealth; I was born into designed poverty.

He drove a Porch; I drove a Chevy.

He wore Birkenstock; I wore sneakers.

 

It wouldn't be an understatement to say that we said two words to each other throughout the semester.

 

We were both trying to graduate.

We both learned the intricacies of fission reactions,

Chain reactions are like billiard balls,

That fact was the basis for the Manhattan Project.

A fusion reaction requires enough force to push hydrogen atoms with the same positive charge into each other.

How would you do that, you wonder?

A mechanical disturbance causes the fission reaction,

Uranium 235 is the element,

That can happen in a laboratory or in a reactor.

The Hydrogen Bomb is a step above the ones,

Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

The fissile material is caged around a Nickel Cadmium core of Plutonium 239,

The explosions must be simultaneous,

For the fission chain reaction to compress the atoms in the Nickel Cadmium core,

A description I recognized reading the Tom Clancy novel, “The Sum of All Fears.”

"600 megatons of TNT,"

"Concussive shockwaves at supersonic speeds,"

Enough to flatten any municipalities,

Capable of murdering populations by the millions,

And the radiation: Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years.

And my senior project improved this killing machine by eleven percent.

 

Source: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/plutonium.html

 

Khalid, my colleagues, and I were mastering the intricacies of Doomsday Devices.

Tearfully, I recounted the Vedic scripture,

J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted at the first test explosion:

 

“If the radiance of a thousand suns

Were to burst at once into the sky.

That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...

(Now)

I [am] become Death,

The destroyer of worlds.”

 

I wept then for the children who hadn’t been born yet.

 

“Pop, isn’t that where you went to school?”

 

Yes, it was.

I was snapped back in the present, then September 15, 2001.

Still reeling from the attacks on 9/11,

And this was the face of my classmate, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad,

Number three in Al Qaeda,

And I was dumbstruck in H-E-B.

I had to move along because someone behind me insisted on getting on with their shopping day.

 

I realized that for Khalid,

Everything he needed to accomplish his dark deed was public knowledge,

Figuring out how to burn down buildings was a mechanical engineering problem.

Not nearly as intricate as it was to build a thermonuclear device.

 

I recall getting an “A” in the course and for my senior project.

I assume Khalid did as well; he seemed intelligent.

Our paths diverged after graduation:

I took an oath to defend my nation,

Khalid joined Osama Bin Laden in the CIA-backed Mujahideen,

Encouraged by President Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Defending Afghanistan from Soviet invasion,

In what would soon become the textbook definition of blowback.

 

I stared at a familiar face.

I connected with him over the time and space of memories.

We were both in the same class in Nuclear Physics.

Like most upper-division majors, we were both just trying to graduate.

I was a pauper, and he was a prince.

We’re about the same age.

Khalid, my classmate, is in Guantanamo Bay.

My penance is Environmental Engineering.

After military communications and the semiconductor industry,

Using my STEM knowledge to make the world better for humanity,

And my family,

But for a moment in Greensboro, North Carolina,

Khalid and I were studying earnestly how to build Doomsday Devices.

Enigma...

 

Image Source: Twitter/Mark HarrisNYC

© December 30, 2022, the Griot Poet

 

Is George Santos’s real name even George Santos?

I’m not sure HE’S even sure!

 

We’ve been gaslit since 2015,

It was inevitable that we’d get a spate of copycat con men and women,

Who wanted to take the mantle from Jack Napier,

AKA the original name for The Joker,

And rule a world that has become Arkham Asylum.

 

He’s not Jewish: he’s “Jew-ish.”

Violating the creative copyright for the sitcom “Black-ish.”

So, let’s push the envelope (a bit):

 

He divorced a woman in 2019 before coming out: “gay-ish.”

Marjorie Taylor, “Secret Jewish Space Lasers,” supports him,

Meaning he probably gets a seat in Congress,

Because Kevin McCarthy is more of a totem than the Speaker’s gavel he hopes to grasp,

Like his clown car party,

George Santos is “Republican-ish.”

Leaving open the possibility of switching to being Independent,

A tactic now called “pulling a Kyrsten Sinema,”

 

Umair Haque opines that we’re in “the golden age of con artists,”

Desperate times call for desperate measures,

Which gives rise to snake oil salespeople,

Charlatans and hucksters who prey on the fearful,

You find them in businesspeople, social media influencers, politicians, religious figures,

Not as often in artists, comics, poets, and scientists,

One group preys on your Pollyannish frailty,

Promising Brexit is better, or to “Make America great again,”

Neither Nigel nor Boris hadn’t a clue about Brexit’s consequences,

Or Trump how to deal with the Coronavirus,

 

Artists, comics, poets, and scientists,

“Tells it like it is” so that you can deal with what’s coming,

 

Reality:

In November of 2022, we crossed the Rubicon of eight billion people on the planet,

The Earth is reaching its breaking point in sustainability,

Its spherical volume doesn’t matter, just the number of its inhabitants,

We have no superluminal warp drives in progress,

We need fewer boorish billionaires and more sharing of resources,

 

So, expect the rise of con artists,

Like Sam Bankman-Fried, Boris Johnson, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump,

Who promise you the Moon (or Mars), as part of their grift,

But don’t have a clue how to do it,

 

Through the slow-motion train wreck of Twitter,

We’re getting a clearer picture of how Martian colonies would fair if Elon managed to talk a few of us into doing it,

Bernie Madoff made the mistake of conning the obscenely rich,

These new snakes are different.

 

Howard Dean, self-described “from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party,”

Took no big money from Wall Street like Third Way Democrats

Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin,

He raised millions in two to five-dollar increments over the Internet:

That became the framework of the grift,

 

What started on the Left as declared independence,

The Right stole and perverted,

George Santos went from being bankrupt,

To pay his campaign $700,000,

 

We are in the age of con artistry,

Phishing emails,

Vishing phone calls,

Multilevel Marketing,

Cryptocurrency,

Billion Dollar lotteries,

And “reality TV,”

 

Because the monied elites have broken society,

Racism, sexism, homophobia, and misogyny,

Are tactics by the 1%,

The actual thieves clearing the shelves of the Earth’s bounty,

And WHY you don’t have the rent,

Student loans are the only ones you can’t declare bankruptcy on,

Because Bank of America and Goldman Sacks require it!

 

They are suffering from Hoarding Disorder:

 

Selfish desires are burning like fires.

Among those who hoard the gold

As they continue to keep the people asleep

And the truth from being told

Racism and greed keep people in need

From getting what’s rightfully theirs

Cheating, stealing, and double-dealing

As they exploit the people’s fears

 

Now, Dow Jones owns the people’s homes

And all the surrounding land

Buying and selling their humble dwelling

In the name of the Master Plan.

The Last Poets, E Pluribus Unum

 

Hulu has FINALLY streamed Season 1 of Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,”

A metaphor for our time,

As Dana, a reluctant time traveler, attempts to save Rufus Weylin,

Destined to rape her great-grandmother,

Making Rufus also her kindred,

And important to her existence,

Anthropology and biology say that we’re all 8 billion distant cousins,

Who has allowed some of the group to elevate their self-importance,

Species survivability is going to mandate SHARING resources,

We’re too immature for warp drive: we’d be spreading empire and war over parsecs.

 

The hoarders call themselves:

Billionaires, chiefs, Popes, priests, kings, queens, “wolves of Wall Street,” plantation owners, Sheiks, and oligarchs,

And they hire,

Willing squires,

To carry out their orders in the halls of World governments,

Don’t expect them to give a wit about democratic republics,

 

Is George Santos’s real name even George Santos?

I’m not sure HE’S even sure!

He’s either a pathological liar or a [really] good kidder,

I am sure that whatever he HAD of a soul, he’s already sold to the highest bidder!

Stochastic Terrorism...

 

Image Source: Instagram

Also:

The stochastic terrorism against the Constitution and people by Donald Trump

Public Intellectuals

© November 1, 2022, the Griot Poet

 

John Wilkes Boothe

Read the pamphlets published by

Dixie oligarchs sent southern peasants,

Who fashioned themselves as southern gentlemen,

Like them, he believed that printed gaslighting,

The peasants took themselves

To the war front for the protection of the institution of African enslavement,

That made the plantation oligarchs wealthy in the first place,

They didn’t own the pavement they marched to war on,

All Confederate soldiers got for their troubles was: PTSD (shell shock),

And the ensign that was flown by North Virginia’s Robert E. Lee regiment,

Who told them after surrendering at Appomattox,

To “fold it up and put it away.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest pulled it out of the drawer,

He got some bed sheets,

Put some holes in them,

Set fire to crosses to terrorize freed black people,

Put together the first domestic terrorist organization,

That STILL isn’t designated as such by the United States Department of Justice!

His BUST was at the U.S. Capitol for over a century!

The oligarchs didn’t lift a finger,

Lived on to age in grace and dignity,

And still got reparations from the U.S. government for “loss of property.”

 

Like Pontius Pilate,

They could walk away from any responsibility,

Wash their hands of any guilt,

Influence violence by remote control,

As a fanatic, they launched screamed:

Sic Semper Tyranus,

Assassinating Abraham Lincoln, the 16th and first Republican President,

Now, his former party advocates it.

 

It is the formula for stochastic terrorism.

 

Stochastic terrorism (noun): the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted:

Example: The rhetoric of stochastic terrorism influenced the lone-wolf attack.

 

“Don’t retreat: RELOAD!” Sarah Palin, summoning the mentally disturbed [being] Jared Lee Loughner,

“Tiller, the Baby Killer,” Bill O’Reilly, sending Scott Roeder like a missile to his church while he served as Usher,

 

“In the old days, folks, they would take them out on a stretcher!”

“Do me a favor: [just] knock the crap out of them, will you? I promise you that I will pay your legal fees.”

“There were very fine people on BOTH sides! I know it, and YOU know it too.”

“Stand back and stand by!”

“Come to the Capitol on January 6th: it WILL be wild!”

 

They say what they WANT to happen,

 

And absolve themselves of any responsibility for the consequences.

 

In spy parlance, it’s called “plausible deniability.”

On the streets, it’s abject cowardice.

 

It is the proverbial “shouting fire in a crowded theater” where none exists,

Then, getting off sexually like a pyromaniac from the mayhem proceeding from it,

 

This poem is now my eighth piece mentioning it,

 

There’s blood on the streets, yet no laws against it,

 

227 million dollars spent over the last four years,

Denigrating Speaker Nancy Pelosi,

Engulfing her face in flames,

Calling for her execution (Marjorie Taylor, the ex-Mrs. Greene),

Shooting an AR15 in a gun range, tweeting it, with the caption: “FIRE PELOSI!”

When questioned, they’re evasive and dismissive:

“Can’t you liberals take a joke? Geez!”

 

Her possible, inarticulate successor, suggesting that he might hit her with the Speaker’s gavel,

Like John Boehner and Paul Ryan NEVER did!

Laughing it off

Deflecting the origins of the violence

To conspiracy theories about:

 

A spat between gay men (obviously, they haven’t met any: ask Lindsey Graham)

The attack was staged,

High crime in blue states (red states have the highest murder rates),

It’s “deep state,”

He overstayed his Visa (so, now we have to build a wall on the Canadian border?),

The Arizona fascist, Kari Lake, making a joke onstage,

Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, touted as the “normal republican,” doing the same,

And, the last gasp of desperate gaslighters: “he had it coming.”

 

This obfuscation is a multiverse of B.S. Mountains!

 

This madness is Karl Rove’s “created realities” on steroids!

 

The reality:

 

The 82-year-old husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi,

Grandfather and great-grandfather, “Pop” of their family,

Attacked in his household at 2:30 in the morning by David DePape,

A disturbed man, a conspiracy theorist, not a male prostitute,

The shortlist is as follows:

Breaking and entering,

Attempted murder,

Elder abuse,

And a laundry list of federal crimes to choose from,

Inspired by a Big Lie and other obfuscations,

David confessed: saying that it was a “suicide mission,”

But somehow, he was going to survive to wheel the Speaker into the Capitol,

As a warning to democrats and quite a few republicans,

And NOT get arrested,

Only if the “rule of law” is WHATABOUTISM and irrelevant.

 

These people are Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane incarnate!

It’s gone beyond the Big Lie Orange Satan sputters on podcasts,

Paul Ryan and John Boehner were driven insane and into early retirement,

By the TEA PARTY,

How do you think you’ll fair with MAGA, Kevin McCarthy?

You would be a SINO: Speaker In Name Only.

You’d be on the hook to Orange Satan and the MAGA Insanity Caucus,

You wouldn’t be able to make deals with Nancy Pelosi,

You wouldn’t pass any legislation beyond tax cuts for the wealthy,

Financial physics would send the economy crashing,

Within three months, we would be shut down because you absolutely wouldn’t know what you were doing,

Nor does your party have any cogent ideas for governing,

You would be in a state of sheer sweating, televised panic,

Nancy would have to save you from your [own] incompetence and plug the holes in the Titanic!

 

No one would watch any sporting events if they erupted in riots,

Political discourse would devolve into disgust and indifference,

 

We have two choices in this election:

 

Harmony, or dystopian fascism,

Autocracy, or federal republicanism,

Democracy, or the Wild West.

 

There’s no way back if we go over this cliff!

The Power of Their Poverty....

© 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.”

Con Job...

 

Image Source (satire has a kernel of truth): Deadline

© March 11, 2021, the Griot Poet

 

“The Confederacy was a con job on whites, and still is,” by Frank Hyman, News, and Observer, http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/community/chapel-hill-news/chn-opinion/article135987178.html

 

A con job

By definition, it is:

“an act or instance of duping or swindling. an act or instance of lying or talking glibly to convince others or get one’s way.”

 

Okay.

 

The Confederacy

Is a con job on poor whites,

Who only sees America as a pie slice,

Of which, they only have a thin part,

The majority of the largesse defying gravity, “trickling up,”

To the bank accounts of American oligarchs,

Whose plantation ancestors gave this lie its start,

 

Any gains in education mean blacks were being “too smart” in their quest for upward mobility,

The made-up word for this: “uppity,”

In its native tongue of Euro-hillbilly,

Denying themselves any opportunities,

 

Healthcare can’t be universal,

That would mean awarding it to the Melanin “them,”

Denying it to brown, black, and Native Americans,

Not realizing to their chagrin,

They shoot their feet and reject the bandages or splints,

 

It doesn’t take a Nobel Prize Economist,

Forcing one-third of a workforce into uncompensated servitude,

Will drive DOWN the wages of the impoverished, white rest,

The south was more prosperous at that time than most nations,

Except ironically, England,

The coverup of civility recently pulled off by Harry and Meghan,

Southern oligarchs would call their kids Mullato children,

 

You fly “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flags, and

Robert E. Lee’s North Virginia battle regiment,

Ensign as your flag of rebellion,

Taking it to your insurrection,

January 6,

You say, your ancestors fought under it,

 

Do you know who didn’t?

 

The one-percent plantation oligarchs,

Didn’t lift a finger, or leave their porch,

Sipping their cups of mint tea julep,

Draft dodging before we had one,

Yet, you’re the first on a mention of reparations for slave descendants to have a hissy fit,

 

Do you know who got them?

 

The aforementioned, one-percent plantation oligarchs,

Your ancestors got body bags, bullet wounds, missing limbs, and shell shock!

 

Your compensation prizes:

Gadsden and Rebel flags,

Faux “supremacy” due to lack of Melanin,

Your wages since the Civil War STILL not living, or keeping up with inflation,

 

Plantation oligarchs,

Financed

An analog version of gaslighting,

Pamphlets, novels, and magazines,

Extolling the virtues of slavery,

That its benefits would eventually

“Trickle-down” to the south’s poor white, duped constituency,

 

“Tick Tock!”

 

Why wouldn’t they teach this to their progeny?

They’ve managed to maintain this con job 400-years,

Arrogantly ignoring a plethora of “trails of tears,”

 

Upgrading the con,

To Internet modems and websites,

“Think tanks” like

The Cato Institute,

Reason Magazine,

Rush Limbaugh,

Talk Radio,

Breitbart,

Storm Front,

QAN,

And Fox Propaganda,

 

Racist slogans regurgitated

From Adolf Hitler,

And Ronald Reagan:

Make America/Germany Great Again,

This sloganeering is gaslighting with a Twitter foghorn,

 

President Lyndon Baines Johnson said:

 

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best-colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

 

It’s way past time to flush this,

Down the toilet for oligarchs’ bullshit,

“Us,” versus “them” has had 400 years,

It’s time to put it to an end,

Instead of being puppets, start living,

 

Place this psychopathic bullshit,

On the rightful shelf of insignificance,

We can’t fight each other, and climate change,

 

Or, save our only planet,

Or, address income inequality,

Or, correct an injustice system,

Or, close all for-profit prisons,

Or, ensure free and fair elections,

 

If we’re still the Pinocchio puppets of Pinochet/Putin fascists,

 

We have to focus on putting this manipulative hate in the past,

 

We can finally eliminate designer stress,

Work together to perfect our union,

And live up to the spirit of E Pluribus Unum.