Copaganda | Black Agenda Report

Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence

05 Jan 2022

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AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File

Copaganda

You can call it Reverse Miranda—
Or—you can call it Copaganda:
highly effective $campaign, permanent budget drain
Preying on poor Peoples’ pain—Protecting 1% reign...

We are the world’s finest fiction writers
Supremely skilled with Dr. Goebbels gift for gas-
lighting—for disseminating disinformation, mis-
information, 1/2 truths—for fashioning big lies...

We deploy 70 scribes—70 Fox-box foot soldiers
as flame-throwers of fear. We bleed out budgets—
whether crime is up or crime is down—with most
Sophisticated Psy-Ops some call: “Shakedown...”

“If you come to The City of Angels ruled by
devils we will treat you like a King—Rodney King—
maybe kill your daughter, the eve of her Quinceañera?
We can’t Protect you from Capitalist deviltry we Serve...
You remain medical emergencies, unmasked coughs,
shoulder to shoulder sneezes; ripoffs and layoffs away
from sidewalk slumber in 1% tent colonies we patrol...”

II.

You can call it Reverse Miranda—
Or—you can call it Copaganda
highly effective $campaign, permanent budget drain
Preying on poor Peoples’ pain—Protecting 1% reign...

A wounded man’s ‘bleeding out’ on Oakland’s
Adams Point near the lake. The police prance
and putz around—backing his neighbors away.
A Highland Hospital emergency room nurse rushes
to aid the man. Her humanity earns threats of arrest.
For gunmen, yellow tape emblazoned: POLICE LINE
DO NOT CROSS is the preferred, time-tested treatment...

III.

You can call it Reverse Miranda—
Or—you can call it Copaganda:
highly effective $campaign, permanent budget drain
Preying on poor Peoples’ pain—Protecting 1% reign...

A B train is heading home to Harlem. A Black man
exiting collapses. A young lunch bucket brother bolts
into action. And soon a rainbow of Columbia medical
students surround them; comforting and stabilizing the
fallen one.
We riders are once again awed by humanity, solidarity
and skills!

Navy blue clouds swarm the platform and signal bad,
Bad weather. Not the drunken brutes with badges that
Descended on City Hall; urinating their beer on its steps—
Extorting the Big Apple’s first Black mayor...

Still, the first thing they do is shoo the students and lunch
bucket brother away, barking:
“This is a police matter—get back—get back!” Up goes in-
dispensable yellow tape!
Fishing in the fallen man’s pockets, they find the thimble-full
of thin blu line their racket runs on...

Former forklift driver/warehouse worker/janitor, Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; BAR's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC. You can Vote for his work at:

GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-town-criers-big-tooth-fund

PayPal: paypal.me/towncrierRNT

Police brutality

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