“Flooding the zone” forced me to rediscover my roots
A conundrum, and a succinct poem depicting America in 2025
Having spent the last 20 years working to expose bipartisan corruption in Washington, I’ve observed the last few months in politics with a confounding mix of feelings. On the one hand, it’s satisfying to see my warnings revealed as more prescient than I wish. It’s also a relief to watch the Democratic Party effectively collapse in public, given how much responsibility it shares for everything from human rights abuses en masse, to wars for profit & plunder, to Trump’s return to the White House.
Of course, realizing the misery to which the future has been consigned prompts some measure of frustration and fear. On the other hand, I’m thankful to have never dragged children into this world, and confident that I won’t live beyond another 50 years, so I’ve been equally grateful to largely step aside and let others—particularly the careerists and apparatchiks who I once tried to hold accountable—grapple with the inevitable consequences of their regrettable ignorance.
Where does one even start?
In the past few weeks, I’ve started posts exploring:
the mounting global climate catastrophe;
escalating attacks on free speech by an administration & supporting grassroots movement that falsely claim to respect it;
the detention of a Palestinian-American student organizer, and what it portends for the “freedoms” that Americans pretend they enjoy;
the long overdue recognition by Europe of the belligerence that has long defined U.S. foreign policy;
political violence within the U.S. and its implications for its claims to represent democracy;
a novel analysis of the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision and its ultimate impact on LGBTQ communities; and
the complicity of a Democratic state governor bending public policy to appease the financial interests of the world’s richest man.
Every one of these posts remains in a draft form, largely because each news cycle has delivered its own outrages overwhelming my capacity to address them all thoughtfully. Some have described this phenomenon as a consequence of leaders “flooding the zone,” inspired by the tactics of authoritarians in the past.
Usually, contemporary references to “flooding the zone” reflect on the institutional incapacity of the press to keep up with the pace of current events, and the constant noise of our president’s governance-by-stream-of-consciousness.
For me, it also presents unique challenges. First, leaving my career in law and politics to become a sports instructor left me with much less time at a computer. While I once enjoyed the luxury of focusing my time on advocacy and activism, I now work primarily outdoors for a living and have struggled to schedule adequate time for research and writing. In addition, my goals and role as a writer have shifted over the last few years.
There was a time when I wrote to inform the public, and correct misinformation spread by journalists enabling the military-industrial fascism that has defined the U.S. for generations. I worked for decades to defend and cultivate democracy, organizing grassroots campaigns from Connecticut to California and recruiting allies to challenge the bipartisan consensus in Washington enabling fascism. I imagined that readers might be able to do something once armed with information.
I’ve discovered since then that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed, Americans prefer comfort, convenience, and are willing to embrace outright and obvious lies rather than value accuracy, insight, or even their own rights. The complicity of so many voices who for decades have enabled America’s predatory class of millionaire and billionaire politicians (on both sides of the partisan aisle) has forced me to reconsider my goals as a writer.
Recalling my roots
I’ll keep writing about law, politics, history, culture, and grassroots resistance to fascism in America. Explaining what others seem to widely overlook, and highlighting marginalized voices and resistance to American imperialism, has given me a sense of intellectual purpose—even if it feels politically futile.
But struggling to define my goals as a writer led me back to where I began, long before ever studying law and discovering my calling as a public advocate and defender of the future.
Even before the socialist manifestos that I wrote during high school in the 80s, my earliest writing included poetry and song lyrics. I’ve never stopped writing in those formats, but have often marginalized them relative to my prose, perhaps reflecting a bias that I internalized growing up with parents who wanted me to enjoy the financial security that comes with more conventional choices.
Yet my first appearances as a public speaker were in the context of hip-hop and spoken word poetry. While my writing & public speaking about law and politics eventually came to reach a far broader audience, it was poetry that gave me my voice, my mode of grassroots organizing, and brought me the inspiration to seek a broader audience in the first place.
I wrote this poem nearly two years ago, on April 9, 2023. At the time, I thought of it as a tongue-in-cheek reflection on the climate disaster and how it will inevitably come home for all of us.
The most compelling art, however, has a life of its own well beyond the vision of its creator. And in the wake of the past few weeks, I have come to see this poem through the lens of an allegory depicting the political news cycle.
Storms
Every weather feature
that unfortunately falls over
any factory farm
flings foul
feces phenomenally
far and wide
Paid subscribers can access a longer poem that I’ve performed across the country since sometime around 2004. I wrote it as a public service announcement for the D.C. Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency recruiting other artists to raise their voices.
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