Gone are the White Picket Fences

Gone are the white picket fences, Sacrificed for crosses row on row. .

“The United States, despite my best efforts and the efforts of others for decades, has been destroyed by its ruling elites for the sake of short-term profits and short-term growth in power over the people. By offshoring its manufacturing jobs, the global corporations destroyed the American middle class and the ladders to upward mobility that had made America the “opportunity society.” Today many former American manufacturing and industrial cities look like the remains of bombed cities”. —Paul Craig Roberts—The United States Has Been Destroyed by Its Ruling Elites

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Gone are the white picket fences

Gone are the white picket fences,

Now rotted and forlorn,

Traded away for chain link, razor wire,

And drab gray concrete, so stony,

So cold and forbidding.

Gone are white picket fences,

where iron curtains are built,

destroyed!—

And built again, longer, higher,

With iron, alloyed with hate and arrogance.

Gone are the white picket fences

eaves dropping on neighborly chatter,

children playing,

framing lush green lawns,

now parched, and extinct.

Gone are the days of the American Dream

The impeccable white picket fence,

The haloed homes of My Three Sons¹

The shinny Chevy’s in every the drive way,

The seas of rabbit ears,

And the ice cream trucks rattling off their rinky-dink tunes.

Gone are the Sixties², the end of civility,

The years of the barbarian invasion,

The death of suburbia³,

The death of the Common Citizen⁴

Then came the assassin’s, two Kennedy’s and King were no more.⁵

Gone are the white picket fences,

As paupers graves in remote regions,

figments of the once great dream,

as the deities of godless greed

slumber in their silk pajamas.

Gone are the white picket fences,

Festooned with fascist morning glory,

The gardeners in their drunken stupors,

Dance on broken glass with bloody feet.

Gone are the white picket fences

From unkempt gardens

Where the sun is harsh

The shadows deep, and the mourning dove

coos its deep lament.

Not once, but twice,⁶

The crazed triumphalists⁷ came, saw,

Danced with glee.

Gone are the white picket fences,

Sacrificed for crosses row on row.

—Robert Billyard (C) 2023

Foot notes:

1. This was a television series of the time depicting the model American family, much like Father Knows Best.

2. It is the contention of the writer the roots of present American crisis were embedded in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Especially the 1960’s where the American Dream was buried and the empire warfare state came into being.

3. With the economic boom following WW II the lot of the average American family improved dramatically, with good well paying jobs and opportunity. Living in the suburbs was the American Dream. A strong middle class grew and it was The Affluent Society

4. A poem by W.H.Auden descriptive of life in America for the average citizen.

5. The 60’s was a decade of assassinations, President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King and many other activists were assassinated. The murder of JFK and MLK were political assassinations as both openly challenged the consolidation of the Empire into an imperialist warfare state.

6. It is the opinion of the writer triumphalism on two occasions led to the crisis we now see. The end of World War ll (1945) and the collapse of the USSR in (1991) were golden opportunities to establish enduring world peace, instead, on both occasions war was chosen by America’s ruling elites. These were the same elites who sponsored the Nuremberg War Crime Tribunals while at the same preparing for Cold War l against the USSR . The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was their declaration of war on the world.

7. The triumphalists confused triumphalism with exceptionalism . They saw themselves ordained as masters of the universe succumbing to a self-destructive ethnocentrism for them and their country.