Greg Bales

Prepositional phrases

We should have rebuilt the towers exactly as they were, within a year. We should have marked the ground with a small, tasteful plaque, and held annual parades celebrating the season we brushed off the worst Osama bin Laden and his pals could dish, then turned on the demagogues screeching from the most shameful perspectives present in our national dialogue when they asked us to pay for the victims’ deaths with civil liberties. We should be whooping and hollering and singing songs about how al-Qaeda bored us, how bin Laden died from neglect, his corpse reeking in the stank of his own sick creed, how not one American teenager died thinking he or she was fighting Saddam over 9/11, and no Afghani or Iraqi teenager died thinking American teenagers were invaders, or occupiers.We should be celebrating how we were centered enough to tar and feather our own vilest blowhards and ride them to Harlem on a rail.

Alas, little more than six weeks after the attacks, Congress had a spryly captioned bill in the hopper—The USA PATRIOT Act.

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center, Marlowe lays into the ugliness of the national security apparatus of the United States. No measured take, this, but full of its own accord, and it begs Americans to remember what happened, and try to become who we promised the world we could be.

“Prepositional phrases” by Steve Marlowe for Chapati Mystery