Feathered Fiends
by Michael R. Burch

Fascists of a feather
flock together.

Alternate:

Conformists of a feather
flock together.

I came up with the "Fascists of a Feather" epigram after Donald Trump repeatedly praised authoritarian "strong men" like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Rodrigo Duterte, Xi Jinping and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Heroic Americans fought a war against fascism and many of them paid the ultimate price, so why is Trump giving comfort to the enemy of democracy?

The alternate version of this couplet was written first and won a National Couplet Contest sponsored by the Society of Classical Poets. The couplet has now been published in one form or another on the websites of major newspapers and news services like TheHill.com, Haaretz.com (Israel), ******.com (Australia), Cleveland.com (as the headline of a letter to the editor), Reddit Political Humor, and Humane Conservatives Unite Blog. Sometimes the epigram is quoted in reader comments, sometimes by the writers of letters to the editor, and sometimes within articles.

Keywords/Tags: fascists, flock, together, fascism, conformists, nazis, blackshirts, brownshirts, dictator, tyrant, autocrat, despot, totalitarian, cultist, militarist

built to be torn
grown and then chopped,
we are.
set up in a mainstream world
blindly unaware that acceptance
is just an illusion with false hype
of great importance.
with conformists scared of 'insanity'
and shunning as the cure for all fear,
individualism falls.
society mindlessly pushes difference
off a black and white cliff
to decompose in a sea of acidic hate.
just for being content with our oddities,
we are shut down like the ignorant.
oh, how unfortunate we are
to be cursed with a brain.