The Minority View

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.

07/24/22
Angwin, CA