Why isn't it enough, that she demands a bad thing for him?

People speak as if Michelle Bachman

held some legitimate claim to be

in our government, simply because

she could get votes for atrocity.

Are we alive to endure this pretense:

that schadenfreude is not, by definition,

popular? Is her Party so triumphant in

its eradication of all memory, that the

starkest, plainest frenzy to injure looks

like an enthusiasm by any other name?

Were you there, for Reaganism's invention

of the phrase, the general population? 

Were you there, when that won victories

at the polls? Were you there, when men

went blind, by the tens of thousands in

the streets, because this discerning 

government denied their counting,

poisoned cruelly to death by drugs

protected by a patent to draw blood?

Or is there some pretending 

to be safe from her next favour 

to her mob?

Harold Brodkey

Sea Battles on Dry Land

  Notes on American Fascism

op. cit.

Randy Shilts

And the Band Played On

St. Martins Press, 1987©

Larry Kramer

The Normal Heart 

  A Play

Plume, 1985©