Introduction to No. 41

Recently, I’ve been rereading D.E. Steward’s poetry book, Torque, from 2006. The second poem in the book is Kakotopic and it feels like he knew exactly how the world would be twenty years later.

There will have been plague
After the systems breakdown
Distribution the first to go
After the collapse of the banks
Asphalt bounded cities with
No more food trucked in and
Governments unable to provide
Energy at less than brownout
To no gasoline no oil no gas
And then soon no electricity
Leaving nothing as we know it
Toward starvation cannibalism
Unimaginable sorts of death
Doris Lessing has seen this far

Well, we haven’t quite got to the cannibalism stage yet though many or the dire predictions feel inevitable simply because the future is now. Once the predicates for a collapsing society are established: the authoritarian rules, military taking over police functions, decimating the work force by removing all the migrant workers, and so on, the disintegration of life as we know it accelerates. If you don’t believe me watch the ICE raids, the bullying and arresting of officials who try to hold the brown shirts masked quasi-state police force, the military troops in the streets under false pretenses, declared “emergencies” that exist only in the paranoid mind of the autocrat-in chief. The white racist dog whistles are no longer silent but in the open. You are with us or against us; America love it or Leave it, from the 60’s, also feels like now. 

Eventually writing a warning such as this one will be illegal, may even become a capital/treasonous offense. It might well be already but since no one reads poetry in the fascist state, it may slip through the cracks. For a while. Death to the individual might not be inevitable but death to independent thinking will be. One day there will be a free and open Internet, press and then next day, it could all be gone. Completely gone. As in erased.  Corporations control the media. The state controls food, water, power, all forms of energy or can completely control it before too long. Extrapolate the misuse of power for personal/autocratic gain and where does it all end?  Remember what Hunter S. Thompson pointed out in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972, in the words of Chuck Colson, “When you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

And that’s where we are right now and I wrote these words before the assassination. Nothing will get any better once the midterms have been fixed and then the presidential (what do you think all that railing against mail-in voting and troops in the blue state city streets are for, anyway?) They said it couldn’t be done. But…. here we are. Sinclair Lewis prophetically wrote in It Can’t Happen Here, showing us, it could. Never say never.

D.E Steward goes on in Kakotopic to posit what happens when the inevitable collapse of the normal rules of society: assured destruction, atomic and otherwise. Does it matter which kind? Not really.  If you want to hedge your bets, stock up on Crypto. I mean what could go wrong with a currency, basically a Ponzi scheme, based on nothing?  It’s the ultimate grift. I mean the housing bubble would never break, the sub-prime rate bubble would never be a problem, crypto at astronomical prices….

This is not a political manifesto. It’s logic, pure and simple: when A happens, B follows, then C.
We are in the B happening phase today, right now as you read this. What does all this have to do with poetry? Everything. Freedom of speech, especially now, is not absolute. Fight for it.

Enjoy the usual, and the unusual, eclectic mix of voices from near and far.  Without you, there is no magazine. Good writing needs good readers! Without the hard work of Jennifer Lagier, there is no Misfit. And thanks to Gene McCormick whose Art provides a visual counterpart to the written words.