The American mind is a turbulent canister of contradictions:
A blood-splotched Guantanamo prison cell floating delicately on a lotus pond,
An unkempt bedroom strewn with silk undergarments
Where truth sits in comfortable exile,
A victim of extraordinary rendition stuffed into the drawer of an adolescent’s bed
Covered in locomotive quilting from Pottery Barn Kids,
A space-age panopticon of worldwide “humanitarian” surveillance
That’s put the Muslim world on 24-hour suicide watch — after first driving it insane,
A dank paternity-ward incubator crammed with the corporate war-party
Planning genocidal assaults against the next group of evil-doers,
An unexploded cluster bomblet in a Wedgewood Jasper vase,
A Norman Rockwell painting mounted in an overflowing septic tank,
Einstein’s brain powering up Dick Cheney’s bedside reading lamp,
Jesus’s soul recharging the sand-encrusted battery of a disabled Hummer,
A decomposed rat lying in state on the Lincoln catafalque in the Capital Rotunda,
Blake’s golden string wound into a ball
Lodged in Rove’s rectal wall.
Peter McLaren is a political activist and the author and editor of over 40 books, including Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. He teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. His writings have appeared in over twenty languages.
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