Tuesday, June 17, 2008

On Reading a Review of Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure

Lynndie England is America and America is Lynndie England.
This writer has seen and tasted her originating dust,
driven through twisting hills and endless fields
to drink water of pure and dusty rejection. Most
Americans know exactly who Lynndie England is,
besides those who simply and unalterably are her,
you have those who grew up around her
loving and fearing and desiring and pitying her.
Because America is the struggle between domination
and vulnerability, the soft forbidden vulnerability
beneath a shell of burlesque domination, itself
beneath a veneer of ideological justification.
You see the tear fall from her eye as she grits her teeth
and you think, this must have been how she handled
the ritualistic Ohio River beatings, American humiliations
born, rolled in soil, punished and laid to rest.

2 comments:

Frank Partisan said...

There was a sense of meter in your post, shades of poetry.

Matt J Stannard said...

Glad you noticed.