It is always strange to me when smug American progressives say the answer to Israel/Palestine is for Israelis to leave the place that they stole when those Americans have no interest or inclination to leave the place we stole.

If you are not native and live in America/Canada/Australia, you believe compromise and progress that works from great crimes without wholly erasing them is possible.

If you say Israel keeps Palestinians in open-air prisons and America does no such thing, you are willfully ignoring a system of reservations, residential schools and land seizures which have perpetuated genocide.

You may think my comparison is laughable because Israel was formed in the recent past (1948) and America’s crimes are lost to history, like when Arizona became a state 36 years before that, or we made Alaska & Hawaii ours, 11 years after Israel declared independence.

It’s tempting to say the feedback loop has gotten out of control—to sneer at minor rock stars and hack writers who’ve salvaged the poem for parts, yanking their titles from it without bothering to understand it. Achebe and Didion had paid it a kind of reverence, after all, and it’s safe to say Kevin Smith has not.

But why not celebrate the trend instead? […]

Even if no one reads poetry anymore, “The Second Coming” is proof that a perfect poem can still go viral in a distinctly predigital way: that it’s become a part of the culture’s water supply. Slouchy though they may be, the misapplications amount to a tribute.