The only thing I have to report this morning is that there is nothing to report.
At least, where our poet is concerned.
She is maintaining radio silence (so to speak), and perhaps
advised to do so to avoid becoming a lightning rod for political retribution. A
number of people must be still peeved about the lost Hometown election and need
someone to blame.
But now that I’m back in the Hometown office, I see not only
the impact of her once working there, but also why we were so taken with her,
our intensity of need that made us vulnerable to her charms, and how much we
are still exposed to this influence even though she has moved on.
The corruption – which is our -- remains, and for the first time, made
obvious to me, and in some ways, has created a much more dangerous landscape in
which to make my way, each member of the
crew here grabbing their piece of power, a pie slim to start with, made even
leaner by the intense greed at the top.
The two owners – the man more than the woman – cling to
their tiny bit of power and wealth often at the expense of those of us who work
for them. (and justifies our poet’s claims last spring about fair and unfair,
right and wrong, and trickling up as a way of finding equity in this unfair
world.
The female owner knows all about our male owners fillandering,
and his exploitation of female employees, though she may have also done her bit
with two previously male employees, who for a time seemed to be her favorites.
I was largely blind to this, although I suspected our poet
read it all from the moment she stepped through the front door of our Hometown
office, which allowed her to begin trickling up here as she apparently had done
in other places.
The only person she
seemed to misread was me. I am too naïve, and for her, a misdirection. She
assumed I had power, when I really was not part of the food chain at all.
She clearly read our former temporary boss better, how much
he liked being part of the power grid, although she needed to jump off his life
boat quickly because he didn’t have his power long, regulated back to the
working class when the real boss returned from maternity leave.
This is why I think she targeted male owner – although in
some ways she misread him as well.
The male owner might indulge in his sexual escapades, he
loves his power and his money more, and that’s why when the small man forced
our poet to resign, our owner – who should have stood up for her – set her
adrift.
It seems men constantly betray her, and this may well be the
same where she is currently, giving her just enough to get what they want from
her, but never enough for her to be able to feel secure.
They exploited her while she thought she was exploited them.
And if as clues from her poems suggest, she feels guilty
about doing those things she needs to do in order to survive, when as that girl
in the poem last spring suggested, she should not.
She is only exploiting the greedy and ruthless, who deserve to
be exploited. But as I have suggested here in other journal entries, she is and
never has been as ruthless a player in this power game as she pretends, perhaps
why she wakes up early dawn each day. She has a conscience, while those others
in this game do not.
And in this game, a conscience is a liability.
I suspect she is undergoing to same betrayal in her current
situation, and will only survive if she moves on to someplace else populated
with other people less ruthless than this crew is.
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