When I first read her latest poem, I got confused by its shifting point of view and the irony of the self-deprecating passages, although the bitterness came shining through.
The tone and content clearly said she was giving up and move on, although equally clearly, doing so not without resentment.
Also clear was the fact that someone had read her the riot act, and implied that Tom had done what he said he would do, getting word to the appropriate powers about RR using her, and those powers had talked to our owner – who instead of standing up for his writer, caved-in and decided to force her to surrender, telling her to “do the right thing” and resign.
Still, she deludes herself into believing her cause was right, as her previous poem claims.
Yet in some ways, she is boxed in, taking the blame for a scheme that wasn’t hers, and yet, she’s the one on whose shoulders the blame gets put, another victim of RR, who has tried and failed to convince other people to do this very thing – she alone was gullible enough to think his scheme as legitimate.
And she so wanted to prove herself, to show how she had the chops to do this job, a tough cookie uncovering corruption that is underneath other people’s noses.
RR played off her need, her ambition, her desire to prove herself in her newly chosen profession, feeding her news bits for almost a year and finally giving her what would have been the story of a career, she is moving on to some more prestigious publication, and he finally getting the revenge he so hungered for.
I feel incredibly guilty in all this, knowing she’s only the took he used, yet the one who must take the most blame, while he largely escapes scot-free, his plans ruined partly because she acted too openly, and people like Tom got wind of the whole scheme.
Perhaps it was enacted too soon, or because I stumbled into the middle of it and started asking all the wrong questions.
I do not know what transpired in the meeting between the owner and her, and whether or not “the little man” made an appearance or merely called the owner to complain, a meeting in which the owner asked the hard question as to whether or not she was involved with RR, who was the source of her story against the congressman, and she reluctantly admitting it, getting the “do the right thing,” line next, at which point she resigned.
On first reading the poem, she seems to be confessing, but on a closer observation it is clear she takes it all back, in a kind of angry irony, capped by the last few lines that basically tells all of us to go fuck ourselves.
Over the last few months, I have seen her at her most arrogant and ruthless, while at the same time, her most vulnerable, someone who thought she was prepared for the world, but soon discovered as her poem points out, a world she does not fit into, a world where corruption is second nature, and people use other people then throw the remains away.
There is no doubt that she will “rise above” all this, yet not without the scars of the conflict, and a general distrust of everybody, until, of course, the next time, when she falls for someone’s fast talking line again, and gets hurt again.
I actually feel sorry for her.
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