The minority view is that greed, corruption, and ignorance Will win out. The minority view is that we’ll continue as we are, Electing despots, terrible leaders representing our Vaingloriously terrible ideas, unwilling to sacrifice Even the most inconsequential convenience To provide a secure future.
Seeing the parched landscape, the ruined forests Of California, bearing stark witness, bearing Stark witness to our taste for destruction; every Monstrously overpowered machine Tearing down the asphalt becomes a heartbreak, It’s no surprise that American automakers Would revisit the muscle cars of the sixties, And no surprise we’d buy them, So driven to deny the reality of the world That we live in, the world we’re destroying.
It got up to one-hundred and seven in Weed. We kept drinking water And the sun bore down On the river of traffic on five, To the west brown hills nearly Lost to the haze, and in the distance I thought I saw smoke.
The signs are all around, every day, Everywhere, inescapable, And still, someone out there Wants to put you behind the wheel Of a motor vehicle that gets twelve miles to the gallon, Hauls a ton-and-a-half payload, Seats nine passengers in air-conditioned comfort, That celebrates your American Exceptionalism With genuine leather seats, a vehicle that will Hearken back to a time from your youth That you barely remember, or never knew, That has no bearing on today, and will Certainly ruin tomorrow, in the minority view.
We’re visiting our daughter and her husband In their home atop Howell Mountain in Angwin, California. We were sitting in the shade on Saturday afternoon, Under ponderosa pine and oaks, by the garden, Watching black-tailed deer, a doe and her fawn, Wandering the woods behind the rusty backhoe By the fence. This morning, Sunday, sun just rising over the mountains, Air clear and cool, there’s a thrashing in the brush By the fence; the doe, struck by a speeding passerby Soon died, and all became still, And filled with regret, and in the minority view There’s an abundance of sorrow in the world, But regret? Not so much. That murdered doe Died for nothing, died because someone needed To get somewhere in a hurry Early Sunday morning. Didn’t stop, Of course, perhaps doesn’t feel regret, maybe Inconvenience, a dent, a bloody fender To wash, some would call it American Exceptionalism, In the minority view.
In the minority view, the ayes have it, And what our eyes behold Driving across this desecrated land As we approach, finally, our Manifest Destiny, is the rampant, Willful destruction of meaning, Of rationale, of sense, replaced, of course, By chaos, denial, and nonsense.
We window shopped along the sidewalks Of St. Helena on this sunny afternoon. There was a parade of classic cars and trucks, Vintage, collectible, in wonderful shape. Parked by the curb in front of the garden store A sixty-two Continental convertible, Top down, suicide doors, gleaming, But all I saw was a backseat Full of shattered John Kennedy, his shattered wife, And a secret service agent scrambling Across the trunk, And the world is filled with sorrow, In the minority view, filled with despair looking back At a past that, with a few tweaks, A couple of bullet casings left unspent, Would have led to a different future, A better one than the one we have, and a damn sight better Than the future we are leaving our children, In the minority view. Ask not what your country can do to you, Ask what you can do to your country, and Apparently American Exceptionalism gives you The right to destroy your democracy, one Gerrymandered vote at a time, ignoring The world as it is, and what it will become, In the minority view.
Perhaps California will secede from the union Once the religious right takes over, The new American theocracy, and if it does- Count me in, in the minority view. I remember Way back in the fifties, when Kennedy decided to run, There were great fears stirred up by Republicans, And those who really run this machine, That if the country elected a Catholic president, He would serve the Pope first, not the people, But here a new conservative Catholic agenda, Eliminating fundamental rights, against the will of the people, Brings home the paranoia of the Kennedy era, brought Home to roost here at the end time, And wasn’t it not long ago that Catholicism was Steeped in distrust, tumultuous controversy and scandal, For what they’ve done to children, what they did To Indigenous children, caught in cover-up rising to the highest Level of the church, and aren’t they still Digging up the bodies, and do we now, Now of all times, need, or want, to be Guided by Catholic, or any, religious doctrine? I beg, I plead not, but American Exceptionalism Means different things To different people, and may Even equate to Catholic Exceptionalism, In the minority view.
In the minority view We are up shit creek without a paddle, A vacuous, formerly magnificent country Without ideals or a future, Corrupted, hopeless, save a few rich citizens Lording over millions of poor, Racing down a dead-end street, lunatics at the wheel, And damn the doe standing at the side of the road, Damn anything in the way, pursuing Our eventual Manifest Destiny, the ultimate Path of destruction, in The minority view.
So have at, in a Hummer hauling a trailer Packed with jet-skis and recreational vehicles, the Huge Winnebago dragging a supersized Jeep behind, Have at, if we need more oil We can just go to war and get some, send the kids Back to the desert, or peddle weapons In exchange for crude. Whatever it takes, In the minority view.
James Garland Poetry 