Inventing the Enemy

1

When the grand imagined menace
has run the course of its phantom presence
                     and vanished into history's mist;

when the enemy we were sold
              and told we had in common
                            has officially ceased to exist

what villain  will we timid  servile fingers find
              to bind us as tightly together
              as when clenched we formed a fist?


What bogeyman will our handlers breed
to keep us in line as we've always been kept
       by feeding  our cynically nurtured need

              to feel that instinctively felt
              at-the-margins-of-reason cohesion
                            induced by communal fear?

What faux-existential  far-fetched threat
will they next invent to re-cement the bonds
                            we held so strangely dear

       when the mists of history have swallowed
              the most recent on the list of big lies
              whose cues we so willingly followed?


2

When the prior  adroitly exploited edition
of Operation Fear   has fulfilled its mission
                     and served its sinister purpose;

when the latest  outrageous made-up menace
has been commanded from behind the curtain
                     to abandon its phantom presence

we mightn't know what the next threat will be
              but this much we can know for certain:

that regardless of whether we notice
or not   another just-as-brazenly-bogus
                     preposterously hopped-up psy-op

       is either currently being cast
              or has already been unleashed
                     with a view to superseding the last.


3

Now should you
as one who sees through all these hoaxes
notice     the currency of control that is fear

              beginning to lose its hold   bit by bit
                     as its tenuous grip starts to slip
                            on more than the usual few

and you think all this slippage might signal
                     our emancipation's imminence
you'd do well to consider  the simple inference

that if more and more of us   flatly refuse
to fall for each less and less camouflaged ruse
that too may coincide with our overlords' plans

since our playing     like consummate rubes
       into their ever-conniving dividing hands
                                          would surely include

a scenario or two that involves
all opposition being masterfully split
into feuding subsets of skeptics and dupes

as we're shrewdly reduced to a fractured mix
                            of fanatically factional groups.