E Pluribus Unum—The Last Poets

#365Songs: June 2

Sometimes, it takes a poet to reveal the obvious.

Those of us in the United States, we live in a vexing nation.

And that’s putting it politely. The US is, in fact, a mind-milk curdling madhouse. The apogee of hypocrisy.

Put even more simply, we are a lie. We have been a lie from the moment we became a nation, to this moment right now.

We declared ourselves a nation on the grounds that all are equal, with the unalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Unless, of course, you were/are a woman, a Native American, a Black person, a gay person, and so forth. Pick a year, any year, and you’ll find someone getting denied the rights we promised right from the beginning.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. I just don’t know how to say what needs to be said. The magnitude of our lie defies description.

This is where the poets comes in. Poets often have the uncanny ability to capture the ineffable within the tangible. To capture the whole of the moon within a dewdrop.

On their song “E Pluribus Unum,” The Last Poets come as close as anyone to capturing the full measure of our false virtue. And they do so by closing the aperture down to the one dewdrop that is SO obvious you’ll kick yourself when you realize what it is.

Money.

Not the concept. Not the idea. Not any given amount.

Literally, money. As in, a bill. A piece of US money.

As with all of the great compositions from the early years of the poetry-and-music collective that is The Last Poets, the song “E Pluribus Unum” contains a relentless many minutes of lyrical brilliance accompanied only by subtle and jazz-inflected rhythms.

The song is a kind of geometric proof, building up its logic and its argument as it progresses:

Now the US mints on paper prints millions every day
And use the eagle for their symbol cause it’s a bird of prey
Now the laurels of peace and the arrows of wars
Are clutched very tightly in the eagles claws
Filled with greed and lust
And on the back of the dollar bill
Is the words “IN GOD WE TRUST”
But the dollar bill is their only God
And they don’t even trust each other
For a few dollars more they’d start a war
To exploit some brother’s mother

You can start to feel the momentum as the logic gathers steam …

Then there’s the pyramid, that stands by itself
Created by Black people’s knowledge and wealth
And over the pyramid hangs the devil’s eye
That stole from the truth and created the lie
Now ANNUIT means an endless amount stolen over the years
And COEPTIS means a new empire of vampire millionaires
And NOVUS is a Latin word meaning something new
An ORDO means a way of life chosen by a few
SECLORUM is a word that means to take from another
Knowledge, wisdom and understanding stolen from the brother
Roman numerals on the base of the pyramid’s face
Tell the date they began to exist
When they established this branch of hell
In seventeen-seventy-six
Now there are thirteen layers of stone of the pyramid alone
An unfinished work of art
For thirty-three and a third is as high as a mason can go
Without falling apart
Thirteen stars in the original flag!
Thirteen demons from the Devil’s bag!
Thirteen berries and thirteen leaves!
Thirteen colonies of land-grabbing thieves!
Thirteen arrows in the eagle’s claws!
Sixty-seven corporations wage the Devil’s wars!
Thirteen stripes on the eagle’s shield!
And these are the symbols on the US seal!

And if that isn’t a close enough look for you, the aperture continues to narrow as the argument builds ever closer to its proof …

Now on the front of the dollar bill
To the right of Washington’s head
Is a small seal in the shape of a wheel
With the secret that’s been left unsaid
The symbols in the middle represent the riddle
Of the scales, the ruler and the key
The square rule is a symbol
From the craft of masonry
The scales represent Libra
The balance of the seventh sign
They also represent the Just-Us
Which you and I know is blind
The key unlocks the mysteries
Of the secrets of the seal
So that only the Govern-you-men
Would know what they reveal
The four words apart form the last parts of
The secrets of the seal
And tells how they fooled the people
Into thinking paper money was real!
Now, THESAUR means the treasury
Where they store the gold they stole
And AMER means to punish
Like the slaves they bought and sold
Then SEPTENT means seven
Like seventeen-seventy-six
When the thirteen devils gathered
To unleash their bag of tricks
Then SIGEL means the images
They’ve created to fool the world
Like the colors on Old Glory
The flag that they unfurled

And if your brain isn’t already broke by this point, get ready for the revelation:

Now the red’s for the color of the Indian man
White’s for the devil’s who stole the land
Blue’s for the eyes that hypnotized
With the tricks and traps they sprung
And even to this very same day
They all speak with forked tongue!
And so the power is in the hand of the ruling classes
Playing god with the fate of all the masses
So the people don’t get any in the land of the plenty
Because E PLURIBUS UNUM means One Out Of Many

When the drums drop out from behind those final four words, it’s the absence of sound that sounds as the scales fall from your eyes.

~

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