US Gulag
for release 06-22-05
Washington D.C.
It has become fashionable these days to express horror and outrage about the hypocritical travesty of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Bill Clinton (who is a born-again Republican and sleeps with G. Bush Sr). is piling on . Yes, and John McCain, who is a born-again Democrat, is calling for an investigation. Amnesty International decries the situation.
Of course Gitmo is an embarrassment. Bushco is running all over the world espousing the virtues of freedom and democracy, while flagrantly denying any semblance of due process to the detainees in Cuba. The whole thing gives our country a black eye.
Senator Richard Durbin of Ill. said last week on the Senate floor:
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, Pol Pot, or others that had no concern for human beings."
Granted, that statement was a little over the top. I don't think we are gassing prisoners at Gitmo yet, but we are producing a public spectacle that advertises the values and practices that we are supposedly at war to prevent.
Then:
Representative Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House armed services committee, went on TV to refute charges by Amnesty International that the Bush administration is running "the gulag of our time" at Guantanamo Bay. Hunter waxed eloquent about how the prisoners at Gitmo had never had it so good. According to him, these guys are in moslem paradise with fruits being fed to them and hot and cold running virgins. This poet couldn't believe his eyes as Hunter displayed a plate of food on fine china that was obviously prepared by the Congressional cafeteria and claimed that this is what the detainees in Cuba enjoyed. Count them. Not one, but TWO pieces of fruit. Why would these guys ever want to go home? Hunter sounded like the idiots who babble about US prisons being country clubs. I've been in a US prison and I can tell you that what the detainees in Cuba are experiencing is not out of the ordinary for any prisoner in the US. There are systematic humiliations and subtle deprivations and discomforts that border on torture happening every day in our own prisons to our own citizens.
Of course what we are doing in Guantanamo is deplorable. How can the world see the US as being anything but hypocritical? We wave the flag of freedom and equality with one hand and then with the other we rob 540 people of their legal right to due process and meaningful representation of counsel. But it's perfectly in character for this administration to say one thing and do exactly the opposite. It seems to be a matter of policy.
But all of this sudden righteous indignation about Guantanamo smacks of hypocrisy as well . These are protests from high government officials and ex-presidents of a country that has, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2,131,180 prisoners being held in Federal or State prisons or in local jails, nearly a quarter of them for drug charges. The Russians didn't have that many people locked up even at the height of the Soviet gulag.
This poet never uses the word 'incarcerated.' It's a word that doesn't belong in poems. It sounds so clinical and impersonal and clean. What I say is 'locked up.' And by that I mean caged in steel and concrete like an animal, because it's not clean and impersonal when you are the one who is locked up. It's easy for politicians and pundits to pontificate about a prisoner's conditions, and to call prisons resorts or country clubs. These idiots know not of what they speak. When you hear the blather coming from Rush Limpball's fat cheeks about Guantanamo being a Tropical Retreat for jihadists, it insults anything vaguely American within your conscience and sensibilities. If he were John Q. Average American, he would be in jail for cracking oxycontin scripts and be confronted with the crude realization that prisons aren't spas.
The Poet's Eye looks askance at the 540 prisoners at Guantanamo. Let's free some of the two million of our own people who are in the US gulag.
"and I don't really know
will the sun rise today
and I don't really know
if I'll work and draw pay
and I don't really know
if there's life upon Mars
but I know that my tears
won't melt these steel bars."
--lrod
