(November 6, 1976-April 22, 2004)

   A Poem for Glenn Beck

 In Honor of Pat Tillman

Glenn Beck! There is something we miss

in this country

that has made both of us

think about honor                                   

and since you have just had the decency

to apologize on Fox News                                                                  August 29, 2010

(I have a big fat mouth)

for calling our President a racist                        New York Times, August 29 2010

let me apologize in turn

for writing a whole book about America

of one hundred thousand words

in which the noun honor does not occur                        American War Machine

when both of us

along with your huge red state audience

and my tiny blue state one

should be able to agree

to recognize and celebrate

the honor of Pat Tillman

who gave up a lucrative NFL career

to enlist as a U.S. Ranger

and fought in the Iraq war

with (as he noted in his journal)

little or no justification

other than our imperial whim                                 Krakauer Where Men Win Glory 167

and then after emails

about his desire to talk to Chomsky             Krakauer Where Men Win Glory 227

was killed two months later

by a comrade in “friendly fire”

Pat Tillman is what we have missed for a long time —

a national hero!

Not like the hypocrites above him

as high as the level of Rumsfeld’s office

and eventually the White House                        Krakauer Where Men Win Glory 307-8 324

who in an election year

ordered a cover-up

and then a cover-up of the cover-up

burning his clothes and his notebook

in what his Ranger brother called

a series of intentional falsehoods

that meet the legal definition for fraud                      Krakauer Where Men Win Glory 319

(with the destruction of evidence

and three  bullet holes

in a tight cluster in the forehead

the doctor suspected criminal intent)                     Krakauer Where Men Win Glory 317

Where are you Woody Guthrie?

And where are you Pete Seeger?

Is there not now some Leonard Cohen

who can bring us all together

to sing in the football stadiums

and poetry boutiques

across America

in honor of Pat Tillman

and condemn those hypocrites

who as could have been predicted

punished the men at the bottom

including the innocent                                              Krakauer Where Men Win Glory 311

while General McChrystal of JSOC                                    Joint Special Operations Command

whom the Army’s own inquiry

 recommended be disciplined

for giving misleading answers                        http://www.johntreed.com/McChrystal.html

and who had already presided

over the torture and cover-up at Camp Nama                                            Esquire August 2006

was promoted to the highest rank?                        http://www.johntreed.com/McChrystal.html

Cf. Jon Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory: the Odyssey of Pat Tillman (New York: Doubleday, 2009)

Peter Dale Scott’s latest book of poems, Mosaic Orpheus, appeared in 2009 from McGill-Queen’s University Press. It can be ordered from Amazon.com. His other chief poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000. In addition he has published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994), published in Canada as Murmur of the Stars. In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award.  

Poetry and other websites are encouraged to repost this poem (with attribution to GlobalResearch.ca).