Скачать или смотреть A poem about Trump's "Golden Dome" and space-based interceptors

Video 13

Poem transcribed below

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Inspiration for poem:
I try to learn about what's going on in the world and how we can make it less terrible, possibly even good, for us while we are all here. I read in Adam Tooze's Chartbook 381 from 07 May 2025 (https://open.substack.com/pub/adamtoo...) about the Golden Dome missile defense system (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidenti.... "Golden Dome" made me think of the stately pleasure-dome in the poem "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem.... And so here we are, with my attempt at poetry. I personally think there are other better uses of these hundreds of billions, possibly trillions, of dollars. I am still learning.

From Adam Tooze's newsletter:
Musk is transforming the economics and politics of space launch and satellites. This has huge implications for global communications and geopolitics and may also add further to his already gigantic wealth. On the geopolitical side, the big news about the space-based interceptor vision of Golden Dome, at least according to Trump’s Congressional Budget Office, is that Musk and SpaceX are what make it affordable. Most of the cost of a space-based interceptor system is in the highly complex interceptors themselves. But before SpaceX transformed the space business, launch costs added 40 percent of total costs. Allowing for the huge savings enabled by SpaceX, the costs for a maximal system with 2000 interceptors are cut by 35 percent.

No doubt, the Golden Dome project will turn into a juicy military-industrial boondoggle. The title advertises the intention. But if we dismiss these massive material realities as nothing more than cronyism and “space junk”, how can we claim to be talking seriously about the future and its politics?

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The poem:

Golden Dome
Or, a vision in someone's dream. A Fragment.

In America did Trump
A stately Golden Dome decree:
Where missiles through the heavens race
Through air measureless to man's embrace
Up to sunless space.

So twice hundred miles of vacant sky
With Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Sensors were girdled round;
And there were space-based interceptors for boost-phase defeat,
Where proliferated many a Warfighter Space Architecture beam;
And here were underlayer and terminal-phase intercepts complete,
Posturing to defeat a countervalue attack with certainty.

But oh! that deep excessive plan which vaunted
Defense against ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise!
A savage place! where next-gen aerial attacks are haunted
By peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries undaunted
As Trump decrees for voters' sudden enthuse!
And from this scheme, with secure supply chain seething,
As if the next-gen security in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fortress momently was forced:
Amid whose swift capabilities to defeat pre-launch burst
Huge components vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or resilience features beneath the contractor's flail:
And mid these dancing dollars at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Hundreds of billions of dollars meandering with a mazy motion
Through Congress and committees the sacred funding ran,
Then reached the coffers measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And 'mid this tumult Trump heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of defense
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the generals and the knaves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A gilded dome with weapons of ice!

A man from African birth
In a vision once I saw:
It was Musk with his ventures
And on his satellites he carried,
Singing of Mars and worth.
Could I suppress within me
His profits and mirth,
To such a deep fortune 'twould win me,
That with wisdom loud and long,
I would see that dome in air,
That golden dome! those threats of ice!
And all who heard should see it there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
Their flashing claims, their floating hair!
Weave a circle round them thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For they on power hath fed,
And drunk the false pledges of Paradise.

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