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    Lies of an Indispensable Nation
    Lies of an Indispensable Nation
    Lies of an Indispensable Nation
    Ebook230 pages2 hours

    Lies of an Indispensable Nation

    By Lilvia Soto

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    Most Americans think that the war on terror started as a reaction to the September 11 attacks on the United States. In a series of poems and essays, Lies of an Indispensable Nation reveals that the seeds of this tragedy were planted much earlier, during Jimmy Carter's presidency, and that by the end of the 20-year fiasco, on 1 September 2021, th

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtmosphere Press
    Release dateSep 11, 2022
    ISBN9781639884506
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      Book preview

      Lies of an Indispensable Nation - Lilvia Soto

      Lies of an

      Indispensable Nation

      Lies of an

      Indispensable Nation

      Poems About the American Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan

      Lilvia Soto

      atmosphere press

      © 2022 Lilvia Soto

      Published by Atmosphere Press

      Cover design by Josep Lledo

      Muito obrigada, Ronaldo Alves. 

      Cover photo by Steve McCurry / Magnum Photos. Afghanistan. Helmand Province. 1980. A Father and son sit together.

      No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author except in brief quotations and in reviews.

      atmospherepress.com

      With profound appreciation

      this book is dedicated to

      the friends who have inspired and encouraged me throughout the process of its writing, especially Michael Annis, Van K. Brock, Flavia M. Lobo, Yolanda Maltezos, Antonio Muñoz, Nora Nickerson, and Enrique Servín Herrera

      David and Judy Ray, who taught me about the poetry of witness and protest

      Pedro Lastra, who taught me to love poetry

      my mother, Lilia Thayne, who was my first model of a just and compassionate human being

      the police, firefighters, soldiers, and civilians who have suffered the violence of 9/11 and the Afghan and Iraq Wars, be they Afghans, Iraqis, Americans, members of the Coalition, journalists, or representatives of international organizations

      every person who knows that an act of aggression against one is an injury to all and a diminishment of our shared humanity.

      Contents

      Introitus

      Sometimes chance is kind to them, sometimes cruel

      Indispensable Nation

      But that’s not all America has to be

      No refuge from fate

      Sequence

      I. The Rite of Night

      A Birthday, Almost

      Mothers’ Hearts

      Rose Valiant

      Blue Man

      The Kiss

      In Paupers’ Field: The Tiffany Angel

      Curious Shapes

      Preemption

      Before War

      The Rite of Night

      The Swallows of Baghdad

      Immigrant Eyes

      The Promise

      Afterimage

      Album I

      Album II: Anfalisation

      Carpe Diem

      Minimal

      Mamá Bonita

      Muqawama: The Lion and the Mosquito

      II. Suqut

      Tomorrow

      The Bodywasher

      Let them wear mink

      and the sky turns red

      A Promise Is a Promise

      for birds don’t mourn in darkness

      The Aftertaste

      Army Surplus

      Zapaterismo

      That was my pig: A Found Poem

      Totenbuchen

      Carding

      The Gravedigger

      Olivia

      A Third Kind

      Three Acts

      into the lizard’s eyes

      III. The Human Switch

      The Human Switch

      Desert Boots

      Crucifixion Update

      They Walk among Us

      No! Not my son!

      The Missing Flowers

      Mirth

      . . . and garlic too?

      until it stops fluttering

      Soldier’s Heart

      . . . but this is a birdless zone

      IV. Waiting for the Barbarians

      and the stars do not want it

      Concerto Grosso

      Marabunta

      Pink Alert or Happy Is the Color of Subversion

      Dynasty

      A Small Red Blotch

      Bulletproofing

      The Littlest Recruit

      The American Century

      Two Flags

      Waiting for the Barbarians

      Legacy

      The Soldier’s Words

      V. The Murdered

      The Pied Piper

      The Choicest Flowers

      The Murdered

      Lacrimosa dies illa

      Works Consulted

      To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles,

      they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call peace.

      - Calgacus, Scots chieftain of the Caledonian Confederacy

      Tacitus, Dialogus Agricola Germania

      Introitus

      Sometimes chance is kind to them, sometimes cruel.

      But at the time their own destruction seems impossible to them. For they do not see that the force in their possession is only a limited quantity; nor do they see their relations with other human beings as a kind of balance between unequal amounts of force. Since other people do not impose on their movements that halt, that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our considerations for our brothers in humanity, they conclude that destiny has given complete license to them, and none at all to their inferiors. And at this point they exceed the measure of the force that is actually at their disposal. Inevitably, they exceed it, since they are not aware that it is limited. And now we see them committed irretrievably to chance; suddenly things cease to obey them. Sometimes chance is kind to them, sometimes cruel.

      - Simone Weil

      Indispensable Nation

      On 19 February 1998, Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, went on NBC’s The Today Show to defend America’s increasingly aggressive stance toward Iraq. But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. Indispensable nation was a phrase suggested to Albright by Sidney Blumenthal, who claims he coined it with historian James Chase to describe the concept of the United States as the guarantor of stability as the sole superpower within the framework of multinational institutions. The phrase became a political cliché.

      On 31 August 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the American Legion that the United States has a unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity, and is therefore not just an exceptional nation but the indispensable nation.

      On 4 November 2016, President Barack Obama told HBO’s Bill Maher, "We are the indispensable nation. People all over the world look to us, and follow our lead. We really are the indispensable nation.... America is not just a great nation in the sense that it’s powerful, but that our values and ideals actually matter."

      On 18 January 2017, Vice President Joe Biden told the World Economic Forum, And it is my hope and expectation that the next President and Vice President, and our leaders in Congress, will ensure that the United States continues to fulfill our historic responsibility as the indispensable nation.

      But that’s not all America has to be

      "The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.

      "Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

      Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. ‘Our country is strong,’ we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.

      —Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, 16 September 2001

      No refuge from fate

      The American military left Afghanistan a few hours before the 1 September deadline the Taliban had promised to enforce. Eleven days later, President Biden, former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and their wives commemorated, at Ground Zero, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that served as an excuse for invading, first, Afghanistan, and a few months later, Iraq. Twenty years. The American occupation of Afghanistan lasted twenty years. That should have been enough time for the United States to be able to brag about having its own immortal epic poem. Twenty years should have been long enough not only to provide enough material worthy of the Iliad, but also of the Odyssey. After the end of the 10-year Trojan War, Odysseus, distinguished warrior and indispensable counsellor to the Greek enterprise, had enough time to visit the Land of the Lotus Eaters, to blind the Cyclops Polyphemus, to journey into Hades to consult the prophet Tiresias, to fight with the sea monster Scylla, to break away from the enticing arms of Circe and Calypso, to escape the lure of the sirens’ song, and to finally return to his beloved kingdom in Ithaca and rescue his faithful Penelope from her greedy suitors.

      Yes, the longest war was long enough, but it will not produce a single great epic, for America does not possess the Greek genius. Intoxicated with its possession of force, it glorifies its use in war and in politics and is willing to use it to turn men into things, as in slavery, the abuses of white supremacy, and the exploitation of workers at home and abroad. It is even willing to turn them into corpses, as in war, regime change, and colonization. America seems to be unaware that her force is limited and that her abuse of it will have serious consequences, for it is on loan from fate, and in the next turn of the wheel, it will be on loan to someone else, someone who will use it against her. This alternating retribution, according to Simone Weil, operates automatically to punish the abuse of force or power and is the main subject of Greek thought and the soul of the epic.

      America has suffered this retribution, as in its loss of the Vietnam War, and now, its loss of the war on terror. It has suffered, but it has

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