Gerald Dillenbeck | + Follow Poet |
Political Verse | + Fav Poem | Comment | Email | Print |

Kleptocracy

I'm reading this book about germs and guns and steel
and pre-history
and human history,
predators and prey,
and people praying they won't be predatored.

You know,
light bedtime reading.

So, this guy who wrote the book...

No, not the Daniel Quinn thing.
Quinn thinks the beginning and end of our nutritional civilization story
is food production.
He forgets we can also hear cooperative health
and overly-rabid pathologies,
like CEOs who promise to bleed the poor to feed those already too rich
under the label of "tax cuts".

I mean,
I guess they are tax cuts
if you happen to be in the top 20% US income bracket,
but that seems to miss the healthier democratic point
that Lower 80% Lives Matter Too.

No, not Quinn,
it is this younger guy,
Jared Diamond,
who probably never even met Thomas Merton.

Diamond mentions "kleptocracy"
where I would use "plutocracy"
or "aristocracy"
rather than "democracy"
but this sounds too kleptomanic
to nutritiously feed integrity
of national health
and personal
and family
and non-elite wealth.

So I had to look up this kleptocracy word
to see if it might be the economist's view
of the political scientist's view
of plutocracy.

And, sure enough,
here it is,
right, but feeling very wrong,
on dictionary.com:
"A government or state in which
those in power exploit national resources
and steal"

This sounds familiar
from the Declaration of Independence,
in which the original USA forefathers
informed the British aristocracy
that we are all done
with the stealing of natural and human resources
thing they called "taxes" and "fees"
and the white male property owners
(including slave owners)
called tribute
and extortion.

Meanwhile I was listening to the Cohen testimony
about some plutocratic kleptocrat
racist extortionist
buying and selling his white privileged way
into our way too WhiteHouse
extolling the unabashed value of WinLose capitalism,
so long as those born into "Win" households
remain unfettered from their colonizing
and extorting
and racist
and homophobic
and xenophobic lack 
of any semblance 
of traditional Christian virtues
or Islamic virtues,
or Buddhist virtues,
or Taoist virtues,
or Hindu virtues,
or Jewish virtues,
or democratic constitutional well-being 
and prosperity virtues.

So, there you go,
I've already learned my new word for this plutocratic day
and kleptocratic nightmare.

Who knew?
We have words for everything
someone might ever need 
to slice and dice
and serve up,
like food production
to grow less healthy 
uncivilized undemocracies.

Copyright © Gerald Dillenbeck | Year Posted 2019

Please Login to post a comment