By Hal Brown
Kirk Swearingen Is described on Salon as follows:
An editor and poet, Kirk Swearingen received his degree in journalism half a lifetime ago from the University of Missouri–Columbia and then took a Greyhound Bus directly into the bowels of early 1980s New York City to study acting. His work has appeared in the Riverfront Times, Delmar, MARGIE, The American Journal of Poetry and Salon. He is currently writing a memoir about his years in New York.
His poem Bark begins:
While waiting on you, I turned to the trees
all around me on the drive, scrutinizing
their bark and how vastly different it was
from one species to another.
and Splitting Logs begins:
First, get muscles. Then find yourself an axe,
or maul, which is as badass as it sounds.
Purchase wedges you find at garage sales.
What does a poet who can craft words the way he does have to say about Trump and fascism? Fortunately we have an answer.
His essay in today’s Salon updates the saying about fascism coming to a country wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross to describe Trump. The article is illustrated with one of the dozens of images of Trump hugging the flag during his 2019 CPAC speech.
Leave it to a poet to amend the line attributed to Sinclair Lewis (incorrectly) and others beginning with:
When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapping itself around the flag and holding a Bible upside down. And riding in a golf cart.
Except this fascism is not so much "wrapping itself with" the flag but more like sexually assaulting it.
If you want it in poem form you can write it this way:
When fascism comes to America,
it will be wrapping itself around the flag
and holding a Bible upside down.
And riding in a golf cart.
He explains in his essay how his thought process progressed as he wrote his essay with the second iteration...
When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters.
and the final version:
When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters — and then scurrying away to hide in a bunker.
Then he considers writing about Trump crying about being a victim and about people not liking him and adds that “the phrase is already unwieldy enough and even I've grown weary of it” so like any good poet he knows when adding more words is superfluous and detracts from the power of the message.
Swearingen notes his own fraternity experience and concludes by likening what Trump has put the country through to a fraternity Hell Week with a reference not every reader will get.
It's an extended Hell Week in America, at least until this guy is out of office. So you better bone up on that Greek alphabet and be ready to "drop trou" (ask Brett about that one, too). Listen up, plebes, they want you to come out on the other end as active members of something bigly, something terrific — something that's definitely not a democracy.
In case you didn't get it: Brett Kavanaugh’s Yale Fraternity Hoisted A Flag Made Of Women’s Underwear In 1985.
I think he may be hyperbole fatigued because calling the era of Trump merely an extended Hell Week in America is an understatement. It has been a nearly four years of being trapped in a level of Hell that the Italian poet, writer and philosopher Dante described. We, meaning those who believe in the American ideal, have been trapped in the Ninth Circle (treachery) which is where Trump belongs.
My story from Thursday is even more relevant as Trump shows more and more signs in just the past couple of days of being dangerously psychotic. There’s no sense in writing yet another story about the need to institute the 25th Amendment though now more than ever he meets the criteria for involuntary commitment for a psychiatric evaluation.