I'm rotten to my core too, but my core doesn't seem to mind.

Thanks...Sweeney

Sometimes it even looks beneficial. Otherwise it would have no way of operating. Very few people wake up in the morning thinking, what is the best way I can damage the people around me. Rather they inflict damage in incriments mostly. Like a frog in slow boiling water everything is okay until it isn't.

I grew up believing we have a good system one of the best in the world. But, now the blinders are off as a nation terrible things have been done in our names and at the same time our rights have been eroding to the point where it is unclear what remains.

truth in poetry can be accidental, but more often than not it is entirely on purpose. The problem with the poetry vs prose arguement is that there is not a real line between the two styles of communication. Prose is not without emotion in fact it is often more emotional than poetry. Poetry isn't about being emotional. In some cases it is not about emotion at all. There is often a cold hard logic behind the poem. Sometimes it describes an emotional state, but it is rarely in and of itself an emotional response. In order to write a poem one must step back from the emotion that is behind the need to write the poem. It is nearly impossible to write a poem in a hyper emotional state.

Now this is likely just my definition of evil. Evil causing bodily harm up to and including murder, emotional harm, or terror in another person to assert the sense of self of the perpetrator. There maybe secondary benefits and reasons, but stripped down it's about the perpetrator needing to assert their sense of self and where they feel they belong in the world. They may have to beat another person because that person challenged their position of authority. They might have to kill someone because they feel like they are losing their grip on who they are. Or they might just bully people to prop themselves up. In some cases the reasoning behind the perps actions is it's about making money, but it really isn't. When a slave master beat his slaves it was more to assert his sense of self than to make them work harder or to not do things the master didn't like.

can be allowed a few fabrications. It is damned awfully hard even when you are trying to, to tell the truth, which you must agree is hard to know, and near impossible to conceptualize. Who can conceptualize love? The task is finished by the prospect of failure before it begins unless you don't give a shit, can only give your best, and let the spirit of the thing move you. I wrote a love poem more about a persistent fantasy I had with my final wife called zipper man. Look for it and give me your opinion. Because in my estimation, and writing it on the spot, and spewing it out, it capture at least much of my subjective feeling on my desires. I don't fallow any hard and fast rules in poetry. A little metre, a little rhyme, and as much truth as I can get to fit in side ways between those two.

I criticize poetry first on subject because subject is art. Not to say evil is not a great subject, but love is better. Great subject makes great art even when the craft of the artist fails to do justice to the subject, and this is always the case, Like all things people who do well will know, perfection lies beyond their grasp. What after all can I tell you or anyone of love when I have failed in every love relationship I have had. First; I would not talk of love because it is so general and infinite. Like evil it cannot be defined except as you have, subjectively. But we all have a sense of love, just as we have a sense of evil, and we may have an example of love just as of evil. It is to this specific example that we must ply the strings of emotion. Which is another part of art, the THING that makes Art so powerful, more powerful in fact than reason in the course of human history. Emotion, unlike reason, has the power to actually change us. When people feel differently is when they will think differently.

Taking evil as an example: consider how difficult it is to address hunger in America and malnutrition. When an old person or any adult suffers hunger while there may be a source of some kind of food near, others at a distance can simply judge the hungry person as morally deficient, Immoral. If it were possible for you to pick up every baby being slowly injured by malnutrition and drop them in the laps of every well fed republican and say: Here you go. If you do not like the government to feeding these people, then feed this one person, or listen to them cry out their pain.

Many looking at humanity as an abstraction can plot horrors for them, but this does not make those people horrible, but only given to abstraction. They want to have themselves considered as human and as real. That does not stop them from viewing others people as if pawns on a chess board. If you have ever seen the movie of the Grapes of Wrath, there is a point where the Jesus Christ character tries to dissuade some men from attacking the migrant labor camp. And He said something like: Come on fellas, there's Women and Children in there. And at this point he is struck down.

I so often find myself with that character's words on my lips, trying to remind people on the right that there are women and children on the other end of this. What seems obvious to many good people is not so obvious to others. They have their relationships at a distance. They don't mind giving to help the poor, but the give to churches that often use the money for them, for their social activities and day care and evangelical efforts. Not much reaches the poor, and yet, they are thus spared the relationship with the poor that would make the poor real in their minds. People can see the suffering in the world, and then they change the channel. I would put it in their laps like a starving child. When these people feel differently, their solution and the solution for the injured and for the defenseless will be the same. Distance does not make the heart grow fonder as much as it makes the heart grow colder. Life's wasted are not pawns or puzzle pieces. These are human beings no different from ourselves in fact.

There is a line from a song by Bob Dylan who often wrote of religion that he attributes and correctly I guess to St. Mark: Before you can heal the sick you must first forgive them. Like towns people in Germany marched through the death camps to witness the horrors with their own eyes, you can see their denial of guilt. I did not do this was written on every face. And yet, one mayor and his wife found themselves guilty, and hanged themselves when they got home. The witness of horror, of human suffering, of our futility before our own avarice does not take a hard heart, but a soft heart- because a hard heart would break.

We are protected by our government, but we have no better protection from the injured than the same distance that has always protected us. On the one hand you have to presume upon the humanity of the many who allow horrors and even cheer it on. But no one is so committed as to work horror for free. Some one is picking up the tab for this behavior, and I know we are allowed so little democratic control, especially over the CIA, that there is little that can be stopped of what they really want to do. No body does nothing for no money. Who really wants to buy this horror, and are they consciously doing so, or only unconsciously.

Evil as an idea is an abstraction of some human quality that cannot be abstracted. There is no love apart from the lovers. Maybe love is a combination of chemicals released in the body to keep us from feeling how stupid we look in love. If we had any dignity, or distance, we wouldn't do it. If you have ever seen porn you realize how stupid people look having sex, and they are digging it and still looking like damned monkeys. Dogs look stupid having sex. Chickens look stupid having sex. It is not because of an accurate self consciousness that people have sex.

What if the torturer is suffering from the same sort of malfunctioning self perception? What if he like a man in sexual bliss feels like the coolest creature on the planet? Hitler loved movies and thought of himself as an actor in his own movie. We all have a witness- if not a fair witness- to our actions in our consciousness, but it is tough to imagine that degree of abstraction of self as hitler showed. It is difficult to imagine what sort of hit as a movie the degradation of humanity to an animal state would make.

Still it is not with the abstraction of this human quality- as evil is -that we will come to terms with it. And the object of art is not just self expression. That is a wonderful end to it, and why I love writing. Some times I have seen myself on a page as I never wanted to be or be seen. Then it was time to find the source of that weed and pull it out

Thanks...Sweeney