by Jeremy Nathan Marks
Daniel Ellsberg, Whistleblower Who Exposed Top-Secret History of the Vietnam War, Dies at 92 —Slate, June 16, 2023. Photo: Dr. Daniel Ellsberg speaks to reporters Dec. 22, 2011, at Fort Meade, Maryland. PAUL J. RICHARDS/Getty Images via Slate.
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I believe that to be a proper critic you need to lead a platoon through the shit and sit on every side of the table read the cables from embassies and fire bases compose a dissertation on aptly named Decision Theory then join a think tank that took its name from something as light as Research and Development. Nor would it hurt to graduate from Harvard and possess an IQ north of the notes a Stradivarius hits in the hands of prodigious digits that can clean an M1 beneath a blindfold like Jim Brown’s men aboard the U.S.S. Tigerfish in one of those Cold War consensus flicks. Daniel had it all Ooh Rah entering the Corps because he was no paper lion but under General Lansdale read every last word emitted by the Pentagon and courted charges under the Espionage Act from men who believed the original sin of American freedom was journalism. But before people say he was just another Eastern Establishment Jew like Kristol Bell Glazer or Chomsky bear in mind Harvard had quotas and Daniel grew up in Detroit the same city where Philip Levine discovered Garcia Lorca who spoke of what was inside forgotten little animals when he lived in Gotham but that could have been Hanoi Hue or the Iron Triangle where Annam Chorus Frogs warned peasants by their silence Daniel defoliated the pretensions of National Security and for interests of state we cannot now forget to say Requiescat in pace or better yet hold for him a Minyan.
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Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. Recent work appears/will appear in Rattle, Terrain.org, Belt Magazine, and Poetica Review among other places.
Oh! Super elegy. Thank you. We may never in our lifetimes see Ellsberg’s like again. He earned it.