"Terrorism is the war of the poor against the rich. War is the terrorism of the rich against the poor."
    -- Peter Ustinov

It's been reported that before his tearful plea for forgiveness from the family and friends whose trust he admits betraying, congressman and former flying ace Randall "Duke" Cunningham rather unceremoniously wore a wire around congress and spent some time talking with some of those very friends he later sold out. But that's not what I started out to write about.

    When I was a child, my mother was fond of reading stories to my brother and I at bedtime. Among the most memorable for me were the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris; in particular, the battles between Bre'r Rabbit and Bre'r Fox.

    "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
    "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
    "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be the master—that is all."
    --Lewis Carroll

                Our brothers and our sisters in Iraq
                Our children, are gone
                and will never return.

                Their bodies will come back
                With their hearts blown out
                Or they will come back

        In 1967, at the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War, the distinguished African writer Wole Soyinka was arrested. The Nigerian Government never officially charged him with any crime, nor did they bring him to trial. Instead, he was held in the notorious Kirikiri Prison for over two years, the majority of that time, in solitary confinement in a 4 x 8 foot cell. During this time, he was frequently interrogated and tortured regarding his "treasonous" and "anti-patriotic" efforts to stop the war. With inside help from sympathetic guards who smuggled him books and writing materials, Soyinka managed to write during that time, and to record his horrific experience in detail.

                After years of putting it off, someone dies,
                leaves you some money…thinking
                of the wife, the kids you’ve acquired
                after years of putting it off
                you make an appointment
                and one night a couple of agents
                show up and sit you down
                and begin to ask questions

                We must kill!
                They must die!

                They must die!
                We must kill!

                When power is placed in the service of vicious reaction, a language must be called into being which does its best to appropriate such obscenity of power and throw its excesses back in its face. Criticism of such language is simply squeamish or christianly--language being expected to turn the other cheek, not stick out its tongue; offer a handshake of reconciliation, not stick up a finger in an obscene, defiant gesture...

--Wole Soyinka, 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature
       

                Lord, let this world choke
                on its ragged masses,

                let it gag on its damned,
                its guilty and its guiltless--no,

                no innocent souls, guide them all
                hand in hand, not to heaven