Of pride and probability

       Take me to your trees.

       Take me to your breakfasts,

       your sunsets, your bad dreams,

       your shoes, your nouns.

       Take me to your fingers.

      

       The thing I embrace in this par-

       odox of celebrating Pride is the

       opportunity it gives to remember

       those who prepared the way, sus-

       taining it still with the daring

       one needs to be gentle. Charisma

       is a fluency in that instrument,

       and no wonder, we listen for it.

That said, the parents of the most prolific gunshot murderer in 21st Century American life have just explained, their child annihilated as many people as he possibly could, on the strength of observing a kiss between two men. Nothing distinguishes this response from the cold crucifixion of Matthew Shepard, really, except the numbers. In haste to claim credit for anticipating all this, Donald Trump has only too modestly ignored his Party's fetish for stuffing American closets with automatic weapons, and has hit upon his genius for fomenting nativist hysteria instead. This does legitimise a little pride, in exposing the desperate hooliganism now embraced by that sorry Party. This carnage marks the convergence of a fulfilled statistical probability, which gun-freak Republicans have labored tirelessly to generate, with an intolerably recurring crime against a demographic group they have oppressed, just as assiduously, since Joe McCarthy showed what fun it is. As partisan denunciations proliferate, against the President for rational forbearance, their toxic jingle of bigotry and violence steeps this coincidence in all too familiar shame. "Radical Islam," eat your heart out. 

Margaret Atwood

Good Bones

Coach House Press, 1992©

Michael Elmquist

  photography

  Simon Purchase James

  Isaac Tullis

  Loammi Goetghebeur

Franz Schubert

An die musik, D. 547

1817

Ian Bostridge, tenor

Julius Drake, piano

EMI, 2005©