Jacob Bacharach's Blog, page 21
February 25, 2015
I Would Prefer Not To
It is a chest of drawers within which dwells
a whole society of tiny men
unweaving, mothlike, so as to weave again
the selfsame fabric; each worker parallels
his neighbors’ motions like the sine-wave swells
of the deep ocean. Rushing toward the ten
blessedly mandated minutes when
they pause for bitter coffee, yet each rebels
at repetition and at repetition’s
repetition; isn’t it, however,
evolution, God, or devil that
bargained the soul’s wages and working conditions?
Security a curse pronounced forever.
Who slaves, at last? Maze-maker? Or rat?
December 29, 2014
The Defeatist Reviews 2014
Several years ago some guy named Pinker
wrote a book, which said that human kind
has now become less violent, more refined.
I pictured him composed like Rodin’s Thinker,
but sitting on the can leaving a stinker.
Here’s the triumph of the counterintuitive mind:
to pitch the fruit of knowledge, eat the rind;
fish proud to have caught that hook and line and sinker.
Was last year the worst that’s ever been?
I doubt it. What’s a good year? What is bad?
History has no progression. It
only accumulates, and no one wins;
to think it otherwise is to be mad.
Care less. Do nothing. Fuck it, man. And quit.
December 10, 2014
Horror Values
Although a large portion of the American media—including “liberal” outlets like NPR—continues to abjure the word torture, the release of the Senate’s summary (the report, of course, is classified) seems broadly to have cemented in the public mind that the United States, in the immortal words of one particular winner of the Alfred Nobel Guilty Conscience Dynamite Prize for Achieving a Certain Notoriety in Global Affairs, “tortured some folks.” In fact, it appears that we tortured, raped, and murdered them, but what is the saying? You can’t make an omelet without breaking into a grocery store in the middle of the night and smashing the dairy case with a golf club? It’s something like that, anyway.
This is all pretty straightforward, but America is a post-moral society, and therefore no obvious evil can be condemned without the palliating piping-in of Drs. Efficacy and Outcome. The principle pushers-back are those ineradicable voices pestering our relativist consciences with the crackpot and insistent doubt: what if it worked? And a great deal of the Senate summary addresses precisely this point, dissecting the claims that there is a direct, operative line between shoving a tube into a shackled prisoner’s asshole and pumping saline into his guts while threatening to rape his children to death and whatever money-hungry ex-Navy SEAL claims to have shot Osama bin Laden on a given weekday. Message: it didn’t work.
Well, that’s good to know, but my relief quails at the yawning moral chasm at which our almost-civilization has come screeching to a Wile E. Coyote halt, legs churning air, and the edge, in fact, behind us. Meep meep: what if it did? What if the Senate’s debunking is incomplete? What if, because this is just how the American media and the popular discourse operate, some doubt, some question, some uncertainty remains? Do we then temper our condemnation based on the possibility, however faint, of a desired result?
You can imagine the dark hole that kind of moral accountancy leads into. I mean, by the numbers, the Final Solution was effective. Not a 100% success, obviously, but within the reasonable tolerances for such a large industrial . . . If you can’t, as a society, find it in your metaphorical soul to proclaim—even halfheartedly and just for the cameras—that it is wrong under any circumstances to beat a man near to death, drive him slowly crazy, then chain him to a wall in a dungeon to let him freeze to death, then perhaps it’s time to reevaluate those core values you’ve got tacked to the wall in the break room. If your “Just Hang In There” poster features not just a kitten, but a noose, then perhaps you’re not quite that inspiration after all.
November 25, 2014
The Law
As a general rule I’m not the sort of man
who thinks our world’s best served by putting other
men into jail. This one Jewish brother
who got famous later on, he said, I stand
with the least of you, the whores and lepers and
the murderers and thieves. Of course, his mother
knew who he hung out with. She discovered
that’s what mattered when the Roman cops ran
into the garden and hauled him out and strung
him up; shouldn’t one of them, at least,
have spent at least one night on a concrete floor?
The question outlived her son’s name on her tongue.
Did he deserve to die like some dumb beast?
Even the beasts—even then—got more.
November 5, 2014
The Elect
Every several years, about one third
of the people go into the temple and
exsanguinate a bull upon the sand,
release an auguring flock of city birds,
divine the numerology of words,
each predetermined cry of pleasure planned
to simulate a state of utter aband-
on; past the city gates the shepherds herd
their flocks; they are as young as the gods appear,
as beautiful, and like the gods they do
not care for the rites; they’d rather truly fuck,
drink, breath, walk, live, sleep, and hear
their own singing voices than what should be true
according to the augurs. They believe in luck.
October 21, 2014
The Cathedral
Last at the altar, first to the door, the pale
young priest asks his congregants which they’ll embrace:
salvation by good twerks or Nancy Grace?
Their googling eyes flick through wikis; fail-
ing to find a clear consensus, they derail
the sermon: what does father think about race-
derived intelligence, or the reptilian face
beneath the POTUS’ hack-job human veil?
Oh gods, make us less chaste, make us less poor,
and do it now; the undeserving have
converted their unworthiness to cash
unbacked except by unearned faith, no more
than gold—though not gold standard—golden calves;
we’ll skip the sackcloth but accept the ash.
September 5, 2014
A Red Line
“Obviously I think that’s a red line for everybody here: no boots on the ground,” Mr. Kerry said.
War’s past and bootworn decades wore them out.
The Romans, though, wore socks and sandals and
conquered most of Europe, snow to sand
and sea to alp. Roads and footwear rout
inferior engineering. When a trout
flashes in a stream, you pick a lure and stand
braced against the cold water, right hand
to cast, left at your hip-waders; you sprout
like a sapling when the rain has swelled the creek.
“Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in
return.” History is a fish going to spawn
against the current, then it dies, weak
with reproduction, but new fish begin
where the last died for the bears. And on and on.
August 25, 2014
No, Angel
Not six-wingèd, nor a fiery wheel,
not four-bodied, though a living being,
human but for other human’s seeing
only what they a priori feel
to be true. Did he say fuck? Did he steal?
Was he sometimes prone to disagreeing?
Black? A teen? All but guaranteeing
some journalistic posthumous appeal
to see the nuance, meaning the bad sides.
No life is a story, and no story has
two sides: it is a universe, expanding,
not some taxonomic Alcatraz.
Here is the truth your subtlety elides:
there is no peace surpassing understanding.
August 20, 2014
If Obedience Is a Condition of Existence, Then We Must Resist by Disappearing
A cop writes that he has the right to shoot
a man for walking too aggressively,
shoot if he delays or if he flees,
shoot if he fails to kowtow or salute,
shoot if he gets too smart or thinks he’s cute.
The predicate of law is immunity
for lawmen; ours is a cop timocracy,
the badge the only property, the boot
the only vote. The price of life is death,
therefore, if you don’t wish to buy it, you
must make an effort never to be born.
Not far away from here, borne on the breath
of a heat-bleeding highway, a hawk or two
rise in spirals over the mice-filled corn.
August 7, 2014
A Love Poem Awkwardly Inspired By a Stupid Video Feature at Slate.Com
Do the rights and freedoms we currently enjoy mean that now is the best time in history to be gay?
When was the best time ever to be gay?
It was when we met. Before that we
were accidents of sex taxonomy;
now we’re texts and winks throughout the day.
Were we to travel back through history,
find ourselves in Death in Venice’s day,
or lounging like ancient Greeks carved in clay
as charms against queer specificity,
I’d still measure the good from when I first
swiveled a barstool so our knees would touch
and laughed too loud and hard and talked too much
and covered my nerves with beer and was the worst.
You still came home with me, and stayed, and here
we are regardless of the marked and measured year.
