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While the White House is seething with Secret Service special agents,
And weighed down by weapons protecting America’s Holy of Holies,
And as racks of ground-to-air Stinger missiles invigilate its no-fly zone,
An uninvited renegade breaches the saturation surveillance.
On a warm June day in the East Room of the White House,
During a keynote interview with incoming President, Barack Obama,
Expressly set up so he can ‘assess his current media standing’,
A sprightly fly penetrates all the armour-plated security.
A glistening Harlequin, intricately miniaturized —
The anarchic Don Juan of the natural world —
It pirouettes on a sunbeam, speed-dances in mid-air,
Seeking out sweetness to fuel its serenades.
It ascends and descends; skips, zooms and capers
And deftly defies the earth’s gravitational pull;
Then, with its compound eye, it negotiates its way
Past bulky figures and CNBC’s bright lightsxiv.
‘Hey! Get outta here!’ America’s 44th President snaps fretfully;
Addressing ‘the signature characteristic of our Admin- ’
He’s forced to interrupt himself in the middle of a lengthy sentence,
Distracted by the signature buzz of this summer fly.
Anxiously aware of the incoming President’s impatient irritation,
And house-trained to turn trivia into historical events,
His earnest interviewer, John Harwood, declares obsequiously,
‘That’s the most persistent fly I’ve ever seen.’
Regarding the interviewer’s remark as a call to arms, the President strikes,
Swatting the hapless insect on the back of his hand and shaking the corpse to the floor.
‘That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it?’, The President invites approval
Before exploding victoriously, ‘I got the sucker!’
At which the room swells with ‘Jesus!’ and ardent gasps of ‘Nice!’
As all vie to outdo each other with coos of admiration.
‘You want to film that? It’s right there. There it is!’, the President excitedly urges.
He indicates his fallen victim as he lets out a fastidious ‘Yegh!’
And the camera crew focus on the trembling speck on the East Room carpet
For the world to share in the President’s triumphant victory.
Still milking the moment, he alerts his Press Secretary, ‘Did you see that, Gibbs?’.
Gibbs beetles off to ensure that the fly’s death-throes are framed in the most flattering light:
In a voiceover he name-checks the Karate Kid who caught flies with chopsticks
(Though not telling viewers that the Kid’s cachet derived from letting them go).
After America’s new Caesar gives the thumbs-down to a belittled fly
The victory goes viral on global news media
With television’s Coliseum baying, ‘Go for it, Mr President!’
And ‘All flies are evil!’; the commentariat scorns other ways to evict them
For isn’t every President issued with a Free Pass to kill?
Yet no one queries the fly’s ‘bad-guy’ stereotype or wonders if it’s misplaced…
For, as well as breaking down waste to generate topsoil for man’s survival,
Life would be buried under piles of bodies and beneath organic matter
Were it not for the purposeful existence of the President’s present quarry, clearing man’s path.
But, ‘Shoot first, ask questions afterwards’ is the national characteristic;
Though without flies, stomachs would be half-full and spring would fall silent,
With plants from catnip to chocolate-yielding cocoa withering up and dying,
Since flies pollinate… so killing one to show off comes close to self-harm.
Though the Blue Bottle and the Green Bottle aren’t the greatest respecters of persons
Each fly’s agenda matters as much as any human’s, even a VIP,
For while it seeks out plant nectar, it performs symbiotic tasks, just like a bee,
It services most edible crops: onion, carrot, sesame... even coffee and tea.
Less temperamental than other pollinators, and less subject to disease,
Flies are crucial to the life-cycle of lettuce, broccoli, radish, avocado…
They’ve a starring role in the growth of cabbage, peppers, and garlic;
Without flies, no sunflowers, their seeds spiralling in golden ratios — nature’s universal pattern.
The insect is life’s cornerstone. Break it, the building crumbles.
Yet they’re despised, for man hates nothing more than those whom he wrongs.
The fly has mastered the art of living together, thanks to its altruistic social evolution,
And might observe man with some curiosity — trapped below in his concrete mazes;
Fouling his global nest; incapable of flying without crashing and combusting.
Flies stare at him serenely then rub their forelegs, as if in supplication.
For in his concrete colonies, man competes for what he can’t accept he holds in common
And instead, ruins rivals and their shared resources with self-serving greed;
Deadening his co-operative instincts, he submits to the corporate rule of puppet kings:
The hood-ornaments with which he decorates the state-machine he can’t drive.
It’s a machine that reveals its character by its dire jargon: ‘compressing the Kill Chain’…
And the Pentagon now spends a hundred billion dollars to secure dominion
Though, by a quirky irony, when its Empire-building soldiers’ wounds get infected
The best cleansing agent is a fly, whose maggots consume their gangrenous pus.
But, of course, if an inconsequential fly makes you gag with queasy disgust
Then why not just kill it? — though, like the Brave Little Tailor
In Grimm’s Fairy Tales who boasted that he had killed ‘seven at one blow!’
Whoever does
so, risks the invitation, ‘Now why stop at flies?’.
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‘The snuff aspect of it, killing the fly, was psychologically useful for Obama…
‘He decided to take it out, and he did take it out.’
The President’s interviewer, John Harwood, later told The New York Times —
Meaning that a violent reaction was the favoured default position.
The Empire’s 44th President had been clear, ‘We’ll lead by building a 21st century military…
‘We’ll have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world.’
And State fear-mongering pumped money into its military personnel,
Two-million men strong; and then into the makers of death-toys
like Raytheon; Boeing; General Dynamics and Schmidt;
And into the electronic warrens of Silicon Valley, where the wired generation
Serves the CIA, the DIA and the NSA — the sulphurous acronyms of repression —
Upon which US citizens spend most of their tax dollars and sponsor atrocities…
For it’s war that drives the US economy, and not the brotherhood of man.
War’s Viagra increases the US economy by sixty percent.
On January 23rd, 2009, Obama gave orders
For the dispatch of robotic flies —
Flying drones befouling the countryside in a vengeful resource war,
Ordered to lay their burning eggs over the Afghan landscape and the Swat valley in Pakistan.
They interrupt conversations. They interrupt the whole social fabric.
They interrupt lives altogether.
And then, with their artificial compound eyes, to spy upon those below,
America’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicles hover above Afghan and Pakistani villages,
Before triggering Hellfire missiles, swatting villagers dead.
The Predator drone’s thermobaric weapons, their fuel-air explosives,
Work by spreading an incendiary mist which then ignites.
A vacuum’s made by a firestorm tearing apart those in target buildings
And bursting the internal organs of farmers in nearby fields.
Mohammed Yaqoob, a Miranshah teacher, reported that, ‘The children are so frightened of drones
‘They can’t concentrate on their lessons. They just sit in the classroom
‘Looking up at the sky where drones continuously hover over the town.
‘They don’t sleep at night. They’re afraid of being bombed in their beds.’
Meanwhile, War Incorporated requires assistance in spinning its atrocities.
Public Relations company, the Rendon Group, helps screen embedded reporters
So military excess can be repackaged as ‘successful surges’, and innocent farmers as ‘terrorists’;
To ensure that America’s war crimes are seen through a rose-tinted corporate media.
And the Pentagon spends $4.7 billion on such public relations:
On what is known as ‘information dominance’
Whereby its ‘information warriors’ neuter all negative images
And sprinkle war crimes with their eau de cologne.
The American public is urged to take an interest in its military and, in March 2009,
At Creech Air Base’s ‘Appreciation Day’ there was a ‘click-and-kill-show’
For taxpayers to study their distant enemies, like insects on a pane, before execution —
Thanks to drone operators showing off their deadly game skills for real.
The air ace who once ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God’
Is now downgraded by the Pentagon’s techno-Taliban
To being a fake flyboy whose ‘situational awareness’ derives merely from hours spent gaming
In American arcades, rather than exploring the ‘wild blue yonder’.
An Air Force pilot now need only be someone trained to sit upright, and who’s mastered Gameboy 2;
Flight-Sim avionics ensure that the robot’s take-off and landing is fully automated.
To the Commanders-in-Chief, the drone warlords zealously directing their squadrons
Of couch potato killers, the Air Force amounts to no more than a Chair Force,
Burning Afghan children and their colourful kites with joysticks.
Predator pilots pretend to be heroes from comic books, vaporizing ‘alien forces of doom’,
Persuaded that they possess superhuman courage with just a screen and a knob.
Elated drone operators yell out ‘Crispy critters!’ on turning electronic outlines to blackened ashes
Programmed to think of as inferior, people whom they can now never know,
Corporal, Rick Reyes of the Marine Corps, would tell Congress in April 2010,
‘Almost a hundred per cent of suspected terrorists turn out to be innocent civilians’;
But the airborne murders did not stop.
Impassioned crowds appear in Islamabad holding up banners:
‘STOP DRACULEAN DRONE ATTACKS’,
‘END THE BLOODSHED OF INNOCENT PAKISTANIS’.
Witnesses described being buzzed by delta-shaped metal flies terrorizing their communities;
Mechanical fangs spitting explosive projectiles, burning their flesh and ending their lives.
At distant bases in Nevada, Predator and Raptor drone pilots with assistant ‘sensor operators’
Sit in a screen-filled office; from here they peep at a colourful, fluttering procession
That moves from the bride’s house to the groom’s…
From here they might hear people singing
The Pashto wedding song, ‘Ahesta boro, Mah-e-man’, ‘Go slowly, my lovely moon.’
But the group at dusk carrying strange instruments signals ‘Red Alert’.
The Pashtun wedding dance, the Attan, once Athenian and before that Zoroastrian,
Has Pashtun men and women spinning round a fire, attaining communion;
But at this wedding, in Farah, it would be a dance of death, finished by swivel seated killers
Swigging sodas and chomping burgers as they send in their gate-crashing missiles.
The wedding song is overdubbed by US explosives;
The wedding’s future offspring killed by a keystroke.
Then, ending their shift, the drone operators use the drive home to Las Vegas to ‘decompress’ —
A ritual in which those battle-hardened by swivelling their Playstation joysticks
Reassure doubtful novices: ‘Rag heads incubate terror.
‘Zapping ’em saves US lives. Gotta be a neat plus, dude.’
A drone survivor in Granai described an aircraft with no pilot that had made a ‘zzzz zzzz sound like a fly’,
And then he added, ‘The bomb’s left people sick. Their mouths bleed when they eat their food.’
He asked, ‘The bomb the Americans used in this place; maybe it’s not been used before?’.
But it has; and it contains Depleted Uranium to cause the same damage to those yet unborn.
Nicknamed ‘termites with thermite’ by their developers and funded by the White House,
Micro-drones, like napalm bats, can now enter buildings and spatter the inhabitants —
They’re programmed to find flesh and to burn it with inextinguishable, chemical flames.
Next to the techno-trolls devising such things, surely a housefly has soul.
For turning war into an electronic tournament detaches it from all human emotion;
And recruiting ads for the military now claim, ‘The frontlines are unmanned’
Since, thanks to PlayStation warfare, spilling blood is only the enemy’s problem:
War’s murder can now be morally neutral, just the technophile’s eye-candy.
At Army Recruitment Centres, war is now presented as ‘war-gaming’xv
Where teenagers are handed out model M-16s
To target Computer-Generated Muslims, or round up ‘Mexican migrants’ at the Border,
And to simulate shooting each of them in the head.
Such games condition a child’s eyes, hands and nervous system
To shoot fast without leaving a moment for reflective thought —
Then, when their electronic fidgeting has erased enough computer graphics,
They can be signed up to cause real deaths on army screens.
‘Kill not the moth nor butterfly’, said William Blake,
‘For the Last Judgment draweth nigh’.
Yet each President’s persuaded they’re as great as a God,
For they dish out last judgments every day.
Keats would glimpse flies in musk-roses… ‘the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves’;
And Proust thought of them as the chamber music of summer promising new summers of the soul;
Sweet, sad John Clare was consoled by their antics, thinking them things of the mind ‘like fairies’;
And Wordsworth loved the creature’s ‘tuneful hum’,
While Blake modestly saw himself as just a ‘happy fly’.
Kit Smart’s ‘Cat Jeoffrey’ would chase and play with a fly till all three of them were
Buzzing and humming with electric joy, cavorting with a seasoned acrobat
dancing upside down on glass; an exotic stranger with honeycomb eyes
And two thousand lenses and no need to be scapegoated
By anyone who can’t see that a fly flags up the life of the day and deserves to be left alone.
Was there a Pashtun Rumi amongst those whom the drones have crushed?
Was there an Urdu Blake whose eyes will never open?
Were there some unwritten dervish poems thermobarically burned?
A Farsi Wordsworth, who’d have praised
Badakhshan’s lapis lazuli — the stone which can bring tranquility to chaos,
The Madonna-blue stone flecked with gold; once
Powdered for pigment, so painters could indicate a gateway to heaven?
To the Navaho, a young man entering adulthood is always visited
By a fly while he’s in isolation in the desert.
‘Big Fly’ whispers answers to questions about the natural order
Which the youth will be asked on returning to the tribe.
But despite another fly’s complex circuitry sustaining bio-diversity,
And being of an intricacy to confound Silicon Valley,
It was judged to have had no place in the television schedule of a politician,
Who impatiently blew its fuses then looked around for applause.
Unlike a fly, the White House is unable to change direction —
Its carbon boot-print firmly indents the planet’s neck
As if ‘God-given’ exceptionalism could guarantee America
Some privileged exemption from the end of civilization.
‘It is a mistake of arrogance to mistake size for significance,’
The Hellstrom Chronicles once declared;
But, according to successive Presidents of the United States,
What’s small can’t be beautiful, just despised.
‘If all the insects disappeared from the earth,’ Jonas Salk has said,
‘Within fifty years life would end… whereas,
‘If all human beings disappeared from the earth,
‘Within fifty years all forms of life would flourish.’
‘We should judge every scrap of biodiversity
‘As priceless,’ E.O. Wilson confirmed;
For, ‘If insects were to vanish, the environment
Would quickly collapse into chaos.’
A chaos presided over by a powerless superman who triumphed over a fly,
Only to find himself ensnared in the darker reaches of the state, and for he himself to fall —
From being the most popular man in the world to one of the most culpable —
A fly who made himself the prisoner of an Imperial web.