BLOOD SPORT: A GEOGRAPHY   

This is a country where there can be a
Ku Klux Klan and the hooded are treated
as mere crackpots, as if their business isn't
snapping Black necks routine as cooks
snap peas at the kitchen sink, as though
this were not lynch land. But it is. Where an
athletic team, the national pastime, no less,
can be named for death squads that
hunted Mexicans and stole their land,
and a rich kid from the upper right can
buy the blood-sport franchise, trade up to
death row, fry dozens, and then as though
there's no impediment to repeating the deed
coast to coast, globally, trade up again,
straddle the continents-coal, oil, timber,
corn, dirt labor cheap-a developer's dream.
But there is. Impediment. Not in the person of
an alternate warmonger from the upper right
with a slightly diversified portfolio. Not in the
referendum on which rich man's plan for
world conquest is best. No. Cross the line.
Here, on the street, hang a left, and 

again. This is a world where there are
roadblocks to imperium, whose mighty force
cannot dismantle them. Chiapas Faluja
Mogadishu Ramallah Detroit. Find the
left out left back left behind. Climb barricades.
Not the Caterpillar cash-contract sort
guarding profit founts for billionaires. The
homemade kind. Battlements built of
bombed sewage plants, gutted schools,
blasted factories, skeletal bridges, babies' skulls,
and layered with paper: pink slips, doctor bills,
eviction notices, no-strike injunctions,
Texas Ranger tickets, Klan lit. Mark your map.
This is the locus. The wall crafted of rage
where tank, Humvee, Rolls will inevitably crash
and-whichever rich white guy was elected to
guide the plunder-the racist robbers' long
free ride will finally end.