Corporate and alternative media, now and in Los Angeles in the 1950s
Friday, 29 March 2024 04:47

Corporate and alternative media, now and in Los Angeles in the 1950s

Dennis Broe discusses the opposition between corporate and alternative media, now and in the 1950s. Image above: Charlotta Bass, editor of The California Eagle

Today with the wars on Gaza, in the Ukraine, and the possible coming war on China, there is a huge gap between what is being said in the mainstream media and what is being said on alternative sites on the internet.

Recently, for example, on the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine, the New York Times ran a Pentagon and State Department account of the war. In this account, the war was started by Russia on February 24, 2022. It included its reasons for being (Putin’s aggressiveness which now threatens all Europe) and its possible outcome (there is none, just continual fighting).

This contrasted sharply on every point with political organizer Brian Becker and Global South scholar Vijay Prashad’s view on the podcast, YouTube, and streaming show The Socialist Program. Prajad and Becker noted that what they called “The Ukrainian Civil War” started nearly a decade earlier in 2014, after a U.S.-backed coup aided by Ukrainian Nazis overthrew the elected head of the country and started bombing the Russian majority Donetsk region killing 14,000 people.

Russia’s “Special Military Operation” then was the response to NATO threatening to absorb Ukraine and put missiles on Russia’s border, with the Russians, almost since the beginning of the SMO, suing for peace in an agreement that was sabotaged by Boris Johnson and the West.

The line of demarcation between on the one hand corporate media and the political class, led by the nose by the arms and fossil fuel industries and by powerful lobbying groups such as Israel’s AIPEC, and on the other hand the legion of podcasters, YouTubers, bloggers and online publications that are every day standing against this deadly barrage, is more sharply drawn than ever. It’s social media versus what seems more and more like antisocial, bellicose and belligerent media.

Interestingly, these lines can also be traced beyond today’s internet alternative media explosion to an earlier period where, with the outlawing and excising of many of the ideas and social practices of the more collectivist and worker-oriented New Deal, there was an equally momentous battle between the corporate media – in this case the dominant newspapers – and newspapers which spoke to and represented audiences left out of the corporate consensus.

Nowhere was this difference starker than in Los Angeles between the high-circulation Los Angeles Times, which had also launched a second paper and its own television station, and the African-American paper The California Eagle, which began in the 1920s and championed the rights of Negroes to own property where they wanted in a heavily segregated city.

The former was run by the Chandler family, who were rabidly anti-union champions of an Anglo Los Angeles, spread out across the county in suburban, individual, single-family homes with a system of freeways and building projects that benefitted Chandler real estate interests. The Times utilized and promoted “anti-communism” as a way of smearing its opponents.

The Eagle’s editor Charlotta Bass stood instead for the vision of an integrated and equal Los Angeles, defending public transit and community institutions, and welcoming peaceful and harmonious intercourse with the socialist world of Russia and China.

 Boo cover

The House That Buff Built 

These differences are also sharply illustrated in my latest Harry Palmer detective novel The House That Buff Built where Harry, in the course of helping his Chinese client to integrate the town of Torrance, encounters both Charlotta and the Chandlers and is stunned by the difference between “The Eagle, [Charlotta’s] modest paper, and the gigantic, but for her monstrous, L.A. Times.

While The Eagle was supported by its African-American community, the Times was the largest newspaper in terms of circulation in the country’s most booming region in the post war period, read and advertised in by the city’s elite. In 1950, the paper, though improving, was still opposed to original unbiased reporting and according to David Halberstam in The Powers That Be was filled with wire service briefs, dispatches from city corporations that it partially controlled and “slanted political coverage that read more like memos from and to the Republican Central Committee than journalism.”

To Segregate or Not to Segregate: Housing in Los Angeles

A primary area of disagreement between the two newspapers was segregation versus inclusion, in the battle over Los Angeles housing. The Chandlers’ vision was of an Anglo Los Angeles with white flight peopling the suburbs and its new inhabitants manoeuvering through a system of freeways with the land, the building materials for the roadways and even the rubber for the automobiles coming from Chandler companies.

The city meanwhile would be remade, with the Times favoring a gutting of the low income habitats of Bunker Hill and Mexican-American villages in what is now Chavez Ravine and the buildup of the Northern part of downtown near the Times building with Norman Chandler, the heir to the fortune in the 1950s, being told when he took over the paper that the key to the editorial page was to “think of what is good for real estate.” The paper actively promoted these interests and this demolition. “Our future,” Dorothy Chandler tells Harry in a candid admission “was not in trying to be a paper for the black or the Latino populations or the low-income white population.”

The Eagle meanwhile was instrumental in furthering Negro expansion out of the tight quarters around Central Avenue where African-Americans had been confined, and instead moving into homes both north and south of this area. Prior to this period a method of enforcement of segregation was restrictive covenants, which forbid homeowners from selling to the “Negro or Mongolian” races, thus also limiting the Chinese to Chinatown. In 1948 the Supreme Court outlawed this use in a case argued by Eagle reporter Loren Miller who would succeed Bass in running the paper in 1951. 

Buffy norman 

Buffy and Norman Chandler

A major site where segregation was either fostered or contested was the society or women’s pages of each paper. Norman’s wife Dorothy Chandler, nicknamed Buffy or Buff, took over those pages in the Times and used them to blackmail wealthy donors to support her vision of “modern” Los Angeles built around what would become gleaming corporate skyscrapers and cultural centres, perched on a demolished Bunker Hill.

Meanwhile, Charlotta Bass used the back pages of The Eagle to fashion women’s groups which she called on for support when homeowners moving out of Central Avenue were beseiged by aggressive “neighbours” who attempted to drive them out of their homes, and this was after the Supreme Court decision which applied only to federal housing projects.

As Harry puts it in the novel, “I thought about the contrast between The California Eagle’s Charlotta Bass, who used the society pages of her publication to rally Negro ladies to defend the hard-won housing gains of her readers trying to secure a better place in Dorothy’s society, and Dorothy’s organizing of the rich [through the Times society pages] in a way that excluded everyone else and furthered their own power.”

Collectivist vs. Individualist Futures

There was also two different visions of the city professed by each publication. The Times was rabidly anti-union, going back to its founder General Otis, who called union leaders “corpse defacers” and unions “the poison of the American future,” and actively resisted unions at the paper. The Times instead favored dividing working people by breaking up urban neighbourhoods and housing them in more isolated, individual units in the suburbs.

 Who framed

Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the plot to sabotage public transportation in LA

The newspaper was against public transportation, instead promoting the individual in his or her own car and declaring on its editorial pages that "Southern California throbs in unison with the purring motors of its automobiles." The paper championed the building of the country’s first freeway which connected the ultra-rich old wealth community of Pasadena with downtown Los Angeles and was then followed by the Harbor, Hollywood, Long Beach and Santa Anna freeways.

The Eagle defended the cheap and environmentally effective mass transit trolleys and buses which ferried its readers to and from work, and was a champion of trade unions, many of which were integrated. They also had African-American women not only as members but also as leaders, in the factories that had sprung up as Southern California became the country’s main motor of production during the war.

When Harry visits Charlotta Bass at the office of The Eagle she lays out this difference:

“She described a city that on one side was made up of the Klan, the National Rifle Association and property restriction organizations, and on the other the labor movement, the Negro, Jewish, Mexican, and Chinese minorities; ‘those people who do the work in the city and who are fighting against the threat of a new fascism at home.’”

Cold War vs. Enduring Peace

Following the lead of its founder General Otis, who led a slaughter against Filipino women and children in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, named his homes “The Bivouac” and “The Outpost,” and organized the Times staff in an anti-union “phalanx” armed with rifles and shotguns, the Times in the 1950s under Norman Chandler was a huge supporter of the Cold War and the anti-communism campaign.

Union busting 

Union Busting at the LA Times 

The Times pushed Richard Nixon in his successful run for the Senate in 1950, calling his red-baiting attack on Alger Hiss “heroic,” as well as being a firm backer of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s paranoid finding of communists next door to every American, lauding McCarthy’s bullying tactics as speaking softly and “carrying the big stick of logic.”

The mainstream newspaper used the generalized attack on what amounted to the reforms of Roosevelt’s New Deal to eventually install their own candidate for mayor, Norman Poulson, in 1952, who would veto what the paper saw as the eyesore of public housing and apply the Cold War policy of “containment” on the home front to keep minority communities bottled up and limit expansion.

On the other hand, The Eagle in its pages constantly favored peace and understanding with both the established socialist republic of Russia and the emerging socialist state of China. The paper covered a global conference on women’s rights in Beijing in 1949 which promoted a transnational anti-colonial platform for women fighting imperial oppression, covered a speech by Paul Robeson’s wife in China, and reported positively on the gains of the revolution as distributing land “so now everyone has a home, a chance to go to school and a job with women treated as equals.”

womens conference 

Women’s anti-colonial conference in Beijing in 1949 

The paper also had a diametrically opposed view of containment, terming the reinstitution of personal homeowner restrictions in the wake of the Supreme Court decision “re-covenanting,” supporting activists who “made it clear that they had not fought to destroy fascism abroad only to have it camping on their doorsteps at home.”

As for the real post-war menace and threat, in the novel Charlotta Bass, who has just been assaulted by a gang of white teens, tells Harry that “They always talk about Negro and Mexican violence, but in reality, and it’s true in your case with the Chinese as well, the real fear is white violence.”

The past as mirror into the future

Today, the mainstream media is more adamantly than ever pushing for war at every opportunity, operating to confuse their audience and make unclear what is crystal clear. Thus a recent example was how Israel’s massacre of starving Palestinians as they clamoured for food was presented in the Western press, not a mass killing of defenceless people, but as a chaotic riot by a stampeding mob. The 1950s example of both the strident self-aggrandizing and bellicose Los Angeles Times and the courageous, resistant California Eagle tirelessly campaigning for equality and peace is more trenchant than ever.

The New York Times was recently the recipient of the prestigious Polk Award for its coverage of the assault on Gaza, a coverage that for the most part was distinguished by its shallowness, lacking any background coverage or treatment of the conflict pre-October 7, 2023. In this light,  Harry’s verdict on the Chandler’s imposing their will in the creation of modern Los Angeles stands as a warning of a too powerful media operating in a vacuum:

“The paper was everywhere. Buff’s ‘civilizing mission’ was part of remaking a town that, when it resisted that mission, might be compelled by whatever means necessary to accept it.”

A small man sits at a very long table telling very big lies and staring like a doll  
Friday, 29 March 2024 04:47

A small man sits at a very long table telling very big lies and staring like a doll  

Published in Poetry

A small man sits at a very long table telling very big lies and staring like a doll  

by Claudia Court, with image by Alix Emery

Russian dolls are built to shrink

     wrap around the next size down

         stream bursting its banks

         invest your money

     can’t buy you love

is like a merry-go-round

table discussions will take place

     names to be written in capitals

          Paris Rome or Kyiv

          patrolled by soldiers

     made of toast

masters raising their glass

ceiling for the fairer sex

     bomb explodes without warning

          flares are so seventies

          music was uniquely good

     gracious is that the time

zone in on your target

practise what you preach

     to the converted

          barn owls screech all night  

          sirens wail in wartime

     rations are never enough

to satisfy a small man

In Dire Parenthesis
Friday, 29 March 2024 04:47

In Dire Parenthesis

Published in Poetry

In Dire Parenthesis

by David Betteridge, with cartoon by Bob Starrett

When it comes to marching, many do not know
That their enemy is marching at their head...
- Bertolt Brecht

Whichever way your missiles fly,
reducing lives and hopes to debris, ash,
or dust; whichever way your anger
and your loathing lie, leaving space
for little else, and least of all for peace;
whichever flag you raise, or language speak,
whichever loyalty events have forced you,
cruelly, by their logic to embrace -
ask this:

Who can speak of "Victory"
or celebrate some smaller gain
that might be deemed success,
when every half a league or verst
that nations may advance
is paid for dear, in blood,
and our world is less?

Who can speak of "Glory"
when the cause of building for
and building by the people
for our common good
has been so widely lost?

After the great sacrifice of the battlefield
and the siege, the blitzkrieg
and the enormities of hate and rape,
what next?

Our class war for justice
and the peace that it may bring
is set aside once more,
put in dire parenthesis,
as our leaders make us ready,
all too ready, for no end of slaughtering
in their next -
and their next one after -
war.

Mr. Zelensky Goes To Washington
Friday, 29 March 2024 04:47

Mr. Zelensky Goes To Washington

Mr. Zelensky Goes To Washington

Vladimir Zelensky has been called many things, depending on which side of the now firmer divide, with the U.S. attempting to recreate the old Iron Curtain, an observer falls. To some he is a hero, valiant defender of a small nation against a mighty one, David to Putin’s Goliath, or a saviour, turning back an invasion by sheer willpower. To others he is a stooge, playing at diplomacy while not actually knowing what he is doing or, worse yet, a puppet, with the U.S., NATO and Ukrainian oligarchs pulling his strings. But, perhaps the more accurate characterization of Zelensky is to take seriously what he is in actuality, an actor, one who has been called upon to play at least four roles.

Servant of the People

Zelensky’s series, Servant of the People, now a global sensation running on Netflix and Arte in France, ran for three seasons, 51 episodes. It catapulted an Alberto Sordi-type everyman into the Ukrainian presidency, based on a diatribe against corruption that one of the students in his high-school history class recorded and posted and then went viral.

DB Zel

The show, which premiered in 2015, is a populist fable about how Vasily Petrovich Holoborodko, in his 30s, divorced and living with his parents, boasts that the country would change if he could just rule it for one week and then gets his wish. The villains on the show are Kiev oligarchs, shown in the opening from the back or in close-up with just their deceiving lips moving as high above the city they boast about the mockery of elections where each controls a different candidate supposedly opposing each other.

Holoborodko unifies the country, claiming that a small portion in the extreme East “The Separatists” and the West “The Nationalists,” both supported by the oligarchs, divide the nation by “country, language and birth.” Instead, Holoborodko preaches unity since “we are all human beings,” illustrated in the last episode by Ukrainian Russians from the “Far East” with their technical expertise assisting in saving miners trapped in the “Far West”. This recalls Georg Pabst’s Weimer film Kameradshaft (Comradeship) with its German and French working class coming together to heal the wounds of the trenches where they were exiled by their oligarchs. The show is a sort of Welcome Back Kotter meets House of Cards where the innocence of the high school teacher in the first rubs up against the cynical power structure of the second.    

One of the show’s funnier sequences has two parliamentarians having sex in an antechamber in one scene and in the next violently opposing each other on the legislative floor. The fake antipathy recalls the Clinton era marriage of Democratic consultant James Carville and Republican and George Bush consultant and Clinton opponent Mary Matlin whose tryst, instead of suggesting complicity by the nation’s rulers in a faux two-party system, as People suggests, instead was marvelled at by the media as a model of “civility.”

Another sequence has a temporary female president supposedly worried about the country but with her anxiety then revealed to be instead about the outfit she is wearing, a page torn from the narcissistic would-be president in Veep. There is a kind of zaniness to this political satire, most evident in the unrelenting music, mocking the always-on-the-go advisors putting a president through his vacuous paces. The show’s dourness contains more than a dollop of Russian fatalist humor and the series was very popular in Russia.  

Servant of the People – The Reality Series

Scarcely had the show finished its run in 2019, when Holoborodko/Zelensky was himself elected president, running on a platform copied right from his character on the show, promising peace, prosperity, and unity while portraying himself as a kind of homespun man of the people, ala Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, who would wage war against political corruption. He would also be a healer, a Jewish Russian speaker from the East who promised to “reboot” failed peace talks with the breakaway provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk and negotiate a “ceasefire” to end a war that had been destroying the country since 2014. Ukrainians, whose level of distrust of their government had reached a world low of 9 percent by the time of that election, ushered Zelensky/Holoborodko into office in a second-round landslide where he beat the standing president Petro Poroshenko, regarded by electors as a part of the oligarchy, by 73 to 24 percent.

Servant of the Oligarchs

Unfortunately, once in office, he himself behaved more like Kevin Spacey’s Machiavellian manipulator in House of Cards then Gabe Kaplan’s affable instructor in Welcome Back Kotter. His clean-up of corruption turned out to be primarily to make Ukraine safe for foreign capital, and so he set about attempting to please Western financial institutions above all else. His neoliberal reforms were in fact even too fast for, as he put it, “The Europeans, the IMF, the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and The World Bank, which were “very happy,” but, he reported, urged him to “slow down a little.”

A key demand of these institutions was “land reforms,” that is a privatizing and monopolizing of lands long held in common since the Soviet period, and the subject of Ukrainian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko’s 1930 film Earth, as well as deregulation of the banking system. The land reform measure was widely opposed with 72 percent against this attempt to accustom the country to, in Zelensky’s words, “the normality of capitalism.” These neoliberal reforms, which Zelensky happily championed, led to industrial decline, salaries in arrears, rising unemployment and—and this is before the war with Russia—massive labor migration and depopulation, with experts predicting the country would lose one-fifth of its population by 2050, to the point where, by the time of the Russian invasion, Ukraine was the second poorest country in Europe, behind only its neighbour Moldavia.    

sellers copy medium

On top of this, there was a paucity of cases instituted to further Zelensky’s nominal mandate, to clean up corruption. A promised corruption task force, the Bureau for Economic Security, still not fully operational almost 3 years after the election. Finally, tensions in Ukraine did not decline but increased as the war in the Donbass dragged on with 14,000 citizens of the two now-breakaway republics killed before the Russian invasion as “unity” broke down with Zelensky, the great unifier, refusing to contest a law that mandated Ukrainian state workers only to speak Ukrainian, though 40 percent of the country speaks Russian. A few months after entering office he had an approval rating of 57%, but by August 2021, that number had dropped to 29, with 69 percent believing the county was going in the wrong direction. Perhaps Zelensky as this point was simply channeling the Peter Sellers character in Being There, Chance the gardener who as unassuming advisor to the White House is inflated to become Chauncey Gardiner.

A more sinister interpretation though accompanied this drop in popularity, as it was revealed that the owner of 1+1 Media the popular television channel that aired Servant, Igor Kolomoyskyi, lent his personal lawyer to Zelensky to be campaign advisor and contributed to and promoted his candidacy on 1+1 and various other media outlets he owned. Once in office, Zelensky removed the oligarch’s opponents, the Prosecutor General, the Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine and his own prime minister who tried to regulate the media oligarch’s control of a state-owned electricity company. At that point Zelensky appeared more like the oligarchs in the opening scene of Servant than the crusading teacher who had only the people’s interests in mind. All this suggests that the serendipity of Servant may instead have been a carefully calculated campaign hatched not in 2019 at the time of the election but in 2015, as the show debuted to widely popular audiences.  

Servant of the Empire

Zelensky’s world popularity, after reaching its absolute nadir in his own country, echoes that of George W. Bush in his before and after 9/11 transformation from academic ne’er do well to wartime leader. Perhaps the last role though is more ominous. With his popularity declining, Zelensky moved to institute more strict controls on freedom in the country. He has sanctioned political rivals and silenced television channels controlled by them, going so far in 2021 as to suggest that those in the Donbass sympathetic to Russia “immigrate there.” His party has also moved to pass a regressive labour law, curtailing rights on working hours and working conditions, as well as making it easier to dismiss workers without compensation, while even going so far as to cancel the rights of women to not be compelled to do strenuous labor. A previous iteration of the bill by the way was supported by the British Foreign Office, no stranger to neoliberal “reforms.”  It should be noted that almost the first act of the Nazi regime in Germany was to outlaw labour unions, and this bill is certainly trending in that direction.  

In addition, just before the war, France and Germany attempted to revive the Minsk accords, which would have allowed a ceasefire, and Zelensky refused to agree to restart the talks.

Zelensky then embarked on his world tour, this time as a kind of Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon who simply assumes the personality of whatever foreign leader he is near. Zelensky has become all things to all people, but especially serving those in the West who want to keep the war going in perpetuity, seeing a chance to achieve a 20-year U.S. goal of effecting regime change in Russia, no matter the cost.

Thus, in the UK his “We will fight on the shores” echoed Churchill’s World War II challenge to the nation in his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech. In Germany, he raised the spectre of the Cold War division of the country, urging the chancellor to tear down the new wall being constructed in Europe by the Russians between “freedom and bondage.”

In the U.S. he urged congress to “Remember Pearl Harbour when your skies were black with people attacking you,” and then called for a no-fly zone which would almost certainly expand the war and potentially lead to nuclear destruction which would “blacken the skies” in the most dangerous way. Those who think the war was engineered by the U.S. as a trap for Russia might also recall John Toland’s Infamy where he attempts to prove that Pearl Harbour was deliberately manufactured by U.S. policymakers as a way to move the U.S. population to accepting entry into the global conflagration of World War II.

Finally, in Israel, he invoked the Holocaust claiming, “Ukraine made the choice to save Jews 80 years ago,” but there he was quickly rebuked with a charge that parts of the Ukraine had participated in the mass extermination of Jews.

meph

Which brings us to Zelensky’s last role, one where he moves from man of the people to perhaps now serving not only the U.S. empire but also, as aider and abettor of the Nazi Azov Brigade as it prepares for a last defence of Mariupol and of “Nationalist” parties such as The Right Sector, with that nomenclature often being a rebranding for a neo-Nazi formation aligned with the military. This new role is more akin to that of the actor in the 1980s film set in Nazi Germany who serves as a front for the government until he loses his effectiveness and is cast aside. Holoborodko, the Servant of the People, may be completing a long, arduous transformation into Mephisto.

Bucha
Friday, 29 March 2024 04:47

Bucha

Published in Poetry

Bucha

by Lisa Kelly

The man who confronted the tank captured
by drone footage. His hands held up.
His wife in the front seat, his child in the back.
What’s next is blurred, what’s later is burned.
The evidence remains. Pepper holes
of bullets in car doors. Shot after shot.

A body lies in the street. A camera shot
of hands tied behind a back. Another victim captured,
wrists bound with white cloth. Bullet holes
fired in backs of heads. Who would stand up
to their oppressor? Images of war crimes burned
in the mind – revealed once the occupiers drew back.

Calling a war, a special military operation takes us back
to calling a publicity stunt a wildlife campaign: a tiger shot
with a tranquiliser gun, a Siberian tiger that burned
brightly for a photo opportunity – captured
and over-sedated. It died for this. Its time up
when he got what he wanted. Amber eyes darkening holes.

All these holes
impossible to piece together, to bring back
meaning. No let up
in uncovering mass graves, basements where citizens were tortured, shot.
What they did…so many people were killed…just for nothing. Have we captured
enough eye-witness accounts? A burned

swastika on a woman’s body. Raped, killed, and burned.
Another generation falling through holes.
More cities like Bucha, more cities captured
with the same horrors unfolding. We roll the film back
and forward to where the past and future show the same shot.
Yet, there are denials, claims this is all made up.

If only the far-right was not on the up:
Putin, Orban, Vucic, Le Pen, Trump, Johnson. Civil rights burned
as they stoke the flames of nationalism. The cheap shots
at immigrants; the illiberalism; the bribes; the gaping holes
in their accounts. Always the fight back.
Complacency is the route to being captured.

Bucha citizens did not give up their right to live whole
lives. After Bucha burned, they took their city back.
For every despot’s shot, the people’s spirit uncaptured.

Siege
Friday, 29 March 2024 04:47

Siege

Published in Poetry

Siege

by Rip Bulkeley

'Wars are fought to change the enemy’s mind'. - Liddell Hart

The grandchildren of the mass killers of Dresden,
Coventry, Tokyo, and Leningrad, leave alone
the atomic bombs, few of whom were ever
prosecuted, now bleat about Mariupol. From war
comes siege, and in siege, from Alesia to Sarajevo,
civilians, including poets, perish like autumn leaves.
From a safe distance our rulers, knowing
that thousands more will die, reinforce
the defence against the option of surrender;
then wash their hands in filthy water.
Most of their comfortable citizens, preoccupied
with economic doom, raise no objections.

Tanka poems for peace
Friday, 29 March 2024 04:47

Tanka poems for peace

Published in Poetry

Gabriel Rosenstock's latest tankas respond to Russian artworks, with a nod to Tolstoy. Image above: Cut down birch, by Ivan Shishkin, 1874

Writing a poem bursting into tears having misheard deforestation for defenestration
Friday, 29 March 2024 04:47

Writing a poem bursting into tears having misheard deforestation for defenestration

Published in Poetry

Writing a poem bursting into tears having misheard deforestation for defenestration

by Lisa Kelly, in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. Image above: Defenestrace, by Karel Svoboda

but before the mishearing and the frustration,
can we deal with

the bursting into tears, and whether the poem is
bursting into tears,

            those leaky, lachrymose drips, or tears,
those ripped up, papery bits,

propelled by frustration and closer to
deforestation, like felling trees

and chopping them into logs, little pieces of what
they once aspired to,

            a composite whole reaching up like
dreamy spires to inspire,

reaching past the highest window in the highest building,
where a general might resist, momentarily, against clear glass
           until
someone tears away from the crowd

           and lifts the latch and everyone sees the
opportunity

which might befall the general, the fate he
deserves, and surges forward,

             as if a valve has burst and liquid motion rushes
at the general who is stiff

as the trunk of a tall tree, whose bark is
bigger than his bite,

whose bite is a chunk taken out of his uniformed
arm by a black bear

which has stripped back bark for the sweet
sapwood, and uses every tool available

             from the sharpness of his incisors to the
tearing of his canines,

and naturally he is tearing up at the injustice of
his predicament for not giving

the right intelligence, for not speaking truth to
power, for not refusing the yacht,

            made of 40 cubic metres of mahogany,
50 cubic metres of cedar

and 50,000 hours of craftmanship, and now here
he is, framed, and about to

fall 40, maybe 50, maybe 50,000 feet to a landing
of broken glass and ransacked rubble

           with the unrelenting view of barren land
where once a forest grew,

where not even his bones nor blood will fertilise
the dirt, so what can he do

but scratch with his thumbnail in the
condensation on the glass a line about
            culpability,

            about tearing up or tearing up, and watch
the self-pitying rivulets

run down the pane, but of course he has no time
for any last words, all thought

evaporated, as he rushes towards his shadow,
leaving a snag of thread

           from his tearing uniform on the lintel as
proof he lived, as we consider

the venerable history of defenestration, Queen Jezebel,
who worshipped a nature god,

defenestrated by her eunuchs, her body eaten by
dogs, as we consider the irreversible

           history of deforestation, and write a poem
bursting into tears or tears having misheard
           deforestation for defenestration.

on living with a larger, expansionist neighbour
Friday, 29 March 2024 04:47

on living with a larger, expansionist neighbour

Published in Poetry

on living with a larger, expansionist neighbour

by Steve Pottinger, with image above 'The War Abroad' by Alix Emery

you know he has always coveted
your garden, considered to be his
by right the olive trees, the earth,
that access to the sea, believes

your home an extension of his own,
tells himself that you are leading
him on, asking for trouble,
driving him crazy by smiling

too much, by not smiling enough,
by smiling at all, flaunting that
independence you’re so proud of,
dressed in that provocative

geography he can’t get out of
his mind, refusing his advances,
gardening your land without
so much as a by his leave

while he presses himself tight
up against your borders,
belly over the waistband of
his trousers, simmering to fury

planning for the morning you
will wake to find the front door
off its hinges, the olive trees
your grandparents planted

chopped and cut to kindling, his
tanks flattening your flowerbeds
and him blocking the way to your
kitchen, stripping the fridge bare,

not expecting you to fight.

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