artwork: ralph murre
POPULIST
RAGE
by
Arlene Zide
Everyone
is suddenly angry.
Angry
in concert.
They’ve
identified the bad guys —
the
corporations, the insurance companies and banks,
the
venal
superrich,
their vain wives and over-indulged children,
those errant
gas-guzzling
husbands who’d been cheating all along.
They
all say they didn’t know.
They
say they were
innocent, victims
of
slick hotshots, those
self-absorbed
moneymaking high fliers.
They,
they’re just the poor populace, the taxpayers, the
American people,
innocent.
They
don’t say,
how
years ago they voted; how they cheered
the
stunned deer president they let
be
swept right up into a lie of office,
they
don’t say how they jeered
the
claims
of
torture, the doubts of any questioners, the opposition
caged,
far
from self-congratulatory conventions.
They
don’t say,
how
they
chose
not
to see
the
flimflam sleight
of
hand,
the
sneer of cunning.
~
first published in Reader Supported News
