OXFORD, Miss.—The Beat poet Gregory Corso came from a generation that most viscerally understood how the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II changed the world. He wrote a poem about it in 1958 appropriately titled, “BOMB.”
“I do not know just how horrible Bomb Death is. I can only imagine.
Yet no other death I know has so laughable a preview…
Corpse the universe … O Bomb, O final Pied Piper
Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb
that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born
magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine all beautiful
and they’ll sit plunk on earth’s grumpy empires
fierce with mustaches of gold.”
[embedded content] “Bomb” written and read by Gregory Corso. Courtesy YouTube
Don’t you love that line, “so laughable a preview”? Did it make you think of former comedian, now current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent visit to Washington, D.C., where President Biden, then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell toasted and lauded him with affection and admiration—the same leaders who called the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine against Russia the nation’s number one priority?
Zelenskyy, looking buff in his green sweatshirt, even got a kiss from 82-year-old Pelosi, when what he really wanted was yet more billions of dollars and weapons to use against Russians. While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is brutal, Russia doesn’t want a belligerent NATO member on their border, one that has already warred against the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine for eight years.
Zelenskyy hardly thanked Congress for the billions he’s already received before he asked for more, assuring his fawning audience that it’s an investment, not a dubious handout to what has been designated as the most corrupt nation in Europe.
Never mind that Zelenskyy has repeatedly called for a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine and other measures that could plunge the world into a third world war and nuclear Armageddon. The neoliberal establishment in Washington—including Under Secretary of State Victoria