A NEWER ORDER

Biting his cigar, an Air Force

general was bent on bombing

Vietnam back to the Stone Age.

A war earlier, he’d firebombed

Tokyo to ashes, human

and otherwise.

Last week

a Las Vegas billionaire

demanded that Gaza be bombed

back to the Stone Age.

Both men

resembled one another: fat

around the belly, frowningly

serious, flanked by sycophants

and affluent.

Without four stars

or a fortune fleeced from suckers

at Casino games, they’d be

ignorable.

Frankly, they sold

the Stone Age short.

Aborigines

learned to work with tools

and fire, hunted animals

instead of one another, housed

their young in the safety of caves

and coped with dangers well

enough to keep the race

from vanishing.

Recently we’ve done

the opposite.

Historians confirm

we’ve killed more people in the last

half century or so than any

nation now or ever, executed

thousands and stocked the country

with more guns than people.

Currently we tally seventy

homicides per day compared

to thirty-five per year in Japan.

To match that kind of savagery

the Stone Age fails to qualify.

But who am I to talk?

While hundreds suffer and die

with our assent in Gaza, I watch

baseball on TV where millionaires

in uniform play a boy’s game

to keep me shamefully distracted

from the world we say we’re saving.

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