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In a Pentagon document “bullets” are referred to as being “kinetic energy penetraters”... “combat” is referred to as “violence processing.”
Doublespeak is language that only pretends to say something. It's language that hides, evades, or misleads... words are used not to extend thought but to limit it... it is language that makes the bad seem good... the U.S. Army doesn't “kill” anyone--they just “service the target”... it wasn't an “invasion,” it was a “predawn vertical insertion”... “soft targets” are cities... actions start happening to fulfill the words that have been spoken.
--William D. Lutz, Professor of English at Rutgers University, author of Doublespeak Defined
1.
These are different hours
That turn our mind, send it
Down the dead-end alley
Littered with past follies
Draped in flags
With words that transcend or deceive
The very bones of definition
Feed inward on themselves
Their fog hovering, descends
As if sheltering some hidden compulsion
The age was not ready to see
2.
Trace their lineage back far enough
On the walls of caves
Is fallen blood
A tri-color blur
Red white and blue
©2003, Michael Hillmer
Michael Hillmer is a poet from Granite City, Illinois. His work has been published in the Head to Hand literary magazine, in the Poems After the Attack anthology here at About Poetry, at the Poets Against the War Web site, and at the Art-Arena World Poems Web site.
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