Trump, War President

Don Zirilli
Aug 26, 2017 · 2 min read
These are just some of the presidents willing to make someone else’s ultimate sacrifice.

Knowing that Trump’s troop increase in Afghanistan would be a tough sell to intellectuals, Heidegger’s Hologram was tasked with shaping Trump into a modern day Henry V by dropping some blank verse.

We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us;
His present and your pains we thank you for:
When we have march’d our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.

He looked into the Sun; you laughed at him.
But he has seen the true eclipse, has glimpsed
the crownéd darkness falling, sets his head
beneath it. Call him clown, a stumbling jest
you parody, defame, and bruise with jokes,
as though a laugh dispels your future tears.

If only you had given everything,
that’s all he wanted, but you sneered, you forced
his tiny hand, and now he’ll raise himself,
like ocean levels, on a sea of blood.

He finally will learn from history
and break his promised peace to fix his seat
atop the golden tower of the State.
The pure devotion, love, and faith he needs
but cannot earn will trickle down from War,
which never fails to unify, and silence
all protest. War, the hallowed grounds for contempt.
War, the funnel of a nation’s glory.

Afghanistan, that desert hourglass,
will tell his time, will sift his Weltanschauung
into our Lebensraum. He tried to sell
you timeshares in the Founding Fatherland,
but you were strapped, and now the clock’s run out.
He makes an offer that you can’t refuse.

And now the joke’s on you, this joke that haunts
the refugees reflected off our shores,
the lowering lower income families,
the colors more than white washed off the page,
for now this joke has grown, it finds your sons,
a generation braced to lose again,
so far to go without escaping. Get it?

A few young lives to set us straight, new blood
as ink for old ideas. We’ll sweep away
the young like dust for Trump’s Again parade,
the march of Good Old Days, the root beer floats,
police bands playing Theremins with tasers
while dancing Walls perform La Cucaracha.

And at the end, he’s waiting on a platform,
and suddenly, he’s presidential, War
Presidential, mandatory love
is pulled out of our mouths. He’s beautiful,
he shines with import, shines with lives. He wins.

)

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