Sonnets (two! count 'em! two!) from the Porch de Guise

Are Post-Election Secessionists Stupid or Evil?

I have to go with stupid. It is just
statistically impossible that we
are building supervillains in the rust
belt, cultivating spores of creeping e-
vil in the heartland. Fifty million feel
no fealty for the union, not a whit
of warmth or worry for the commonweal?
Rubbish. Phsaw. These people give a shit
about their neighbors, their communities.
But they’ve been fed a steady diet of Koch
(Big Oil, Wall Street, Pharma, other sleaze),
till they truly believe the killing joke:
that rich folk battle wicked government
to keep our nation healthy and content.

Which is to say, of course, that poor folk are a blight,
an epic fail, a curse of prodigality
dragging the country down. The rhetorical sleight
of hand required to swallow such chicanery—
in light not only of statistics, but also
of common-sense observance, the view from the ground—
is staggering. How is it everyone I know
knows someone with a health-care nightmare to expound,
yet scores of millions of Americans forget
such stories to defend the brigands, the insur-
ers, and the charlatans by point of bayonet?
We as a nation are diseased with no known cure:
we shun our demonstrated facts as maledictions,
mumbling instead a litany of deadly fictions.