A nation twice pitied, eternally despised

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

– Jonas Mekas

In exactly one week, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the new president for the second time. Undeservedly by most accounts!

People are expressing fear and loathing on every imaginable media platform. There is also much anger and resentment. Ironically, people are unhappy with the result their cherished democratic system confirmed as the winner, even those whose arms were twisted into voting for him.

Already shady billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who allegedly bought the new president or a significant shareholding in POTUS Inc., are causing considerable fractures in the nation. Musk is dividing the right-wing base who dote on Trump with immigration issues. At the same time, Zuckerberg plans to abandon fact-checking on his social media platform in a move calculated to re-establish the era of pernicious misinformation and disinformation prevalent during Trump’s first term of office.

Currently, large areas of Los Angeles are being decimated by raging fires. Still, the outgoing president, Joe Biden, has prioritized an additional $8 billion military aid package for Israel to continue its genocidal aggression against the Palestinians and others in the Middle East. While his voting base has been proposing some of the most absurd reasons as the cause of the fire, Canada to the North and Mexico in the South, who Trump has repeatedly denigrated in the run-up to his inauguration, are helping to put out the fires.

Unsurprisingly, no right-wingers feel threatened that Mexican or Canadian firefighters are stealing their jobs. Unfortunately, they’re also completely unaware that their beloved democracy is about to be stolen from them.

Celebrated Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran wrote a scathing poem published posthumously after he died in 1931. It is unclear if Pity The Nation was about his homeland, some other country or the USA itself. What is clear, though, is that it could apply to any nation, and given that he had been living in the USA since 1895, it could very well be about his adopted country.

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years,
and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation

Nearly seven decades later, in 2007, American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti also wrote a personal version (a reading of the poem can be found here on YouTube) of Pity The Nation as a tribute to Kahlil Gibran. Lawrence, an activist, painter and publisher, wrote his tribute poem in response to his great dissatisfaction with the George W Bush presidency and probably those leading up to it.

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty

Both poems make startling references to the people and political figures of the time, contemporaneous with the respective authors. What is remarkable about both poems is how prescient they are of current politicians and the current political turmoil in the USA. They could well have been writing about Donald Trump, the wealthy, unscrupulous conmen who surround him, and the unmindful, credulous people, shunning historical lessons, who put him into office.

As someone observing from another country, I have minimal sympathy for the plight of a nation that spurns its poets for politicians.