Systemic

I thought I'd test the proposition that I can no longer write poems like "A Televised War"- so I sat down and had a go- and what I came up with was a quatrain about Joe Biden consulting his watch while receiving the caskets of the service people who were killed in Kabul. It was moderately clever and I was immediately ashamed of its cheap snippiness. Joe Biden is a terrible president, but the war has been passed like a parcel from administration to administration and his just happens to be the one that was holding it when the music stopped.

To concentrate one's fire on an individual is to imply that there's someone out there who could do a better job. But is there? Experience- the experience of having a string of variously ineffective and personally embarrassing presidents one after another- all of them committed to servicing the needs of the military industrial complex- suggests that the problem isn't with persons but with the system....