a poem by Weldon Kees

 A poem by Weldon Kees, which is pertinent to our present situation, with all the warmalarky being drummed out by the media vis a vis Russia, China, etc. When of course we should be stripping the Pentagon of the vast majority of its funding and using that funding to solve the problem of climate change, no less. The Aztecs used to keep up their social order by staging battles, the Spanish reported. These "flower wars" were arranged so that the proper blood sacrifices would bring fertility to the earth. Georges Bataille was fascinated by this ethnological tidbit.

"The priests killed their victims on top of the pyramids. They would stretch them over a stone altar and strike them in the chest with an obsidian knife. They would tear out the stillbeating heart and raise it thus to the sun. Most of the victims were prisoners of war, which justified the idea of wars as necessary to the life of the sun: Wars meant consumption, not conquest, and the Mexicans thought that if they ceased the sun would cease to give light."

Bataille's account is usefully contrasted with this New York Timesaccount of the drone assassination system. The article focuses on a drone strike in West Mosul, which entailed a meeting of officials to sign off on:

"They had also concluded that there was no civilian presence within the target compound. Though the surveillance video had captured 10 children playing near the target structure, the military officials who reviewed this footage determined the children would not be harmed by a nighttime strike because they did not live there: They were classified as “transient,” merely passing through during daylight hours."

After which, behold, the drone came: 

"Across town, Ali Younes Muhammad Sultan, Sawsan’s father, heard the news from his brother. Everyone at the dinner had been killed: Zeidan and his wife, Nofa; Araj, Ghazala and their four children; Zeidan’s adult son Hussein, Hussein’s wife and their six children; Zeidan’s adult son Hassan, Hassan’s wife and their two children; and Sawsan, their own beloved daughter. Sultan and his wife went to the hospital where Sawsan’s remains were taken.

“If it weren’t for her clothes, I wouldn’t have even known it was her,” he later told me. “She was just pieces of meat. I recognized her only because she was wearing the purple dress that I bought for her a few days before. It’s indescribable. I can’t put it into words. My wife — she didn’t even know whether to go to her daughter, or the rest of the family first. It is just too hard to describe. We’re still in denial and disbelief. To this day, we cannot believe what happened. That day changed everything for us.”

America (United States of) has refined the flower wars for its own purposes, which are well known among the population. The more money pumped into the military, the more profit made by those associated with the military. So now we have, according to the NYT account, drone wars in which we kill 4000 peeps a year, about, mostly darker colored, Islamic people, and we are all happy about it. We should be less happy about it.

YEAR'S END

The state cracked where they left your breath

No longer instrument. Along the shore

The sand ripped up, and the newer blood

Streaked like a vein to every monument.

The empty smoke that drifted near the guns

Where the stiff motor pounded in the mud

Had the smell of a hundred burned-out suns.

The ceiling of your sky went dark.

year ago today they cracked your bones.

So rot in a closet in the ground

For the bad trumpets and the capitol's

Long seasonable grief. Rot for its guests,

Alive, that step away from death. Yet you,

A year cold, come more living to this room

Than these intruders, vertical and warm.