78 contemporary poetry
I heard the president say: ‘We’ll fi nd them. It’ll be a matter of
time to do so.’
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘We know where they are.
They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east,
west, south and north, somewhat.’ (p. 27 )Later these claims are contradicted:
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘We never believed that we’d
just tumble over weapons of mass destruction.’ (p. 51 )I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We never expected we were
going to open garages and fi nd them.’ (p. 51 )I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘They may have had time to
destroy them, and I don’t know the answer.’ (pp. 51 – 2 )I heard Richard Perle say: ‘We don’t know where to look for
them and we never did know where to look for them. I
hope this will take less than two hundred years.’ (pp. 51 – 2 )I heard Tony Blair say ‘We know that Saddam Hussein
had weapons of mass destruction, and we know that we
haven’t found them, that we may not fi nd them. But what I
wouldn’t accept is that he was not a threat, and a threat in
WMD terms.’ (p. 68 )Weinberger’s sequence uses rhetoric against its assumed premise of
legitimation and authority to create a political critique. The poet’s
careful juxtaposition of information indicates how quickly politi-
cal narrative contradicts itself. German émigré Hannah Arendt
focused our attention on how, in totalitarian regimes, mass propa-
ganda wilfully plays with falsehood as a strategy for alienation,
inertia and subsequent reaffi liation:
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the
correct assumption that, under such conditions, one could
make people believe the most fantastic statements one day,