A Night in D.C.: They Blamed the Ducks

No way could we sleep. My wife, our youngest son & I were in Washington, D.C. for The Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Even though it was after midnight, we walked around The Mall, beginning with the rally stage set up so the Congressional Dome could be seen through the arch.

I wanted to visit The Lincoln Memorial at the opposite end of The Mall, because that's where Glenn Beck had made his speech that the U.S. "turn back to God," saying "for too long this country has wandered in darkness." If he had meant torturing bad intelligence out of a mentally ill detainee, all to send over 4,000 dedicated citizens unnecessary early deaths in Iraq, I would have agreed. Too much darkness.

But what Beck really meant was that the darkness had fallen 18 months prior when the nation elected a president who, according to Beck, followed Liberation Theology, which Beck attributed to Marxism. It's odd Beck should say that because in The American Indian Museum just off The Mall, Liberation Theology is attributed to a Vatican pronouncement in 1962. Beck opened his rally with prayers and references to God  and then distorted Liberation Theology to drive a wedge between us & them. Beck used The Lincoln Memorial as a platform to distort someone's private spiritual beliefs so a political opponent could be isolated, marginalized and defeated.

What follows are some impressions from that night's walk. I wrote these down after the Poetic Justice Reading at CSUSM on 11/18/10.

They Blamed Ducks
October 2010

After the Rally to Restore Honor and
before the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,
we walked around the WWII Monument,
something looked wrong.
The Lincoln Memorial lit in the dark,
the white marble president luminous behind the columns,
but not as bright as a postcard.
A park ranger explained the Reflecting Pool was drained
because migrating ducks had defecated in it and polluted it.
The memorial, less luminous with less reflection of its light.

Gracefully, Lincoln's words were still on the walls,
The Gettysberg Address & his wartime inauguration,
words to fight, die--and as Liberation Theology would have it--
to shoot back and kill over.
I can't say it was sweet.

Unlit between Lincoln and the Jefferson Memorial,
was the unfinished Martin Luther King Memorial.
How difficult to reconcile King's "Where Do We Go From Here?"
with Glenn Beck's cry to "Take our country back."
How impossible to match Jefferson's "progress of the human mind"
with Beck's "Progressivism is the cancer in America."

In the American Indian Museum, beaded Bibles on one wall,
rifles on the other side,
Liberation Theology defined as the poor's right to shoot back.
All around The Mall, ideas Beck cannot abide with.
He'd blow the fourth floor off the American Indian Museum,
grind the words off the eastern wall of the Jefferson Memorial,
dream a MLK memorial silent on militarism.

In caves and condos around the world, terrorists
dream of blowing away as much of Washington as Beck did
during his rally to restore honor. Both begin by invoking God,
then invoking "great men" and "giants,"
then defining President Obama as an infidel God does not recognize.
Beck, however, got close enough to drop the load he'd been carrying
on the steps of The Lincoln Memorial and
shit flows downhill.

Later, they drained the Reflecting Pool.
They did not blame outsourcing, deregulation,
counter-insurgency training for despots,
pipelines for oil & cocaine,
warterboarding the insane for bad intelligence,
land wars in Asia or deficit spending to do so.

No one blamed Becks' tacit compliance with the above
or his faith of division, his dogma of deceit or
his blindness to the person in the president.
They blamed the ducks.