If I could stop wrestling with entropy
long enough to consider this notion
raised over and over the years
like a scaffold, like a hangman’s noose
and dangled before me with its dark promise
I might shudder
I might shake at the well of hostility it invokes,
the unshaken spell
of certain historical narratives,
cocoons from which the faithful
never emerge.
I might flip over the idea of flippant
say that I am too busy arguing
with my opinionated tribe
those members I don’t agree with (not mentioning names)
or those I want to bring back into the fold:
the lost tribe of Dylan
or the lost tribe of the born-again-Christian side of my family
and its even more lost children
who can’t remember what they don’t know
and probably have no interest
in knowing.
I might venture irony
mention how important it is
to manage my financial estate and related affairs:
the shared portfolio, investment properties,
superannuation trust – and to hobnob
with my friends on Wall Street
or in Hollywood or those in the Knesset,
all those who
can do me favors
whenever called upon,
who can provide protectsia.
I might cast some caustic lines
something about being absorbed
studying The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
or The Merchant of Venice or drinking
the blood of children or poisoning wells,
something conforming
to stereotype, something reinforcing the accusation
made solely on the fact
of my being Jewish
without reference to any other facts
of temperament, conduct, history.
If I am conspiring to control the world
I’m making a poor job of it: the wrestle with entropy
has worn me out with the daily encroachment
of children’s toys, paperwork,
random objects and outstanding tasks
colonizing my energy
so that I begin and end each day
recognizing control
as illusion
and all responses to such accusations
as irrelevant
Copyright 2017 David Ades
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The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is an anti-semitic fabricated text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The forgery was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. According to the claims made by some of its publishers, the Protocols are the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of Gentiles, and by controlling the press and the world’s economies. Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies that were distributed throughout the U.S. in the 1920s. The Nazis sometimes used the Protocols to stir up propaganda against the Jews; it was assigned by some German teachers, as if factual, to be read by German schoolchildren after the Nazis came to power in 1933, despite having been exposed as fraudulent by The Times of London in 1921. It is still widely available today in numerous languages, in print and on the Internet, and continues to be presented by some proponents as a genuine document. [source: Wikipedia]
What a terrific poem. It’s just like David Ades to use humor to satirize these crazy ideas!! Bravo! Still, it sounds like David is part of the vast entropy conspiracy !!
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