Four short lines, and a whole machinery of contempt is already running. Dave Bonta's "Strategy" sounds like someone at a planning meeting handing out roles: one person to hate, one to cheat, and a third, not yet chosen, who will be "most fit for us / to condescend to." What's missing is as striking as what's there. Nobody in the poem has a name, a face or a fault. They are just "one," a slot to be filled, while the speaking side is a smooth, collective "us." The central idea, as the poem suggests, is that cruelty can be organised so calmly that it starts to look like administration.
The title does a lot of the work. "Strategy" is a word from war rooms, boardrooms and chess, and it promises calculation rather than passion. That is the unsettling move. Hatred is usually imagined as hot and irrational, yet here it is one item on a list, placed beside cheating as if both were simply tools. The grammar backs this up. "One to hate / and one to cheat" is made of two identical phrases joined by "and," like entries in a ledger. There is no "I," no reason given, no feeling expressed. The flatness of the voice is what makes it chilling.
The poem has no capital letters, no punctuation and no regular rhyme scheme, but sound still ties it together. "Hate" and "cheat" share the same clipped final "t" and differ only in their vowels, a near-rhyme that makes the two verbs feel like close relatives. The lines also lengthen: roughly three syllables, then four, then six, then five. The first couplet is tight, almost a snapped instruction. The second stretches out, as if the speaker, having dispatched the crude business, can settle in to think about the delicate one.
That second couplet changes the mood. With no question mark after "who is most fit for us," we can't tell whether this is a question being asked or the third item in the list, a third "one" still to be selected. Either way, "fit" is slippery. It means suitable, but it may also carry a faint echo of strength and survival, as though the person chosen has been judged by some standard of usefulness. Then comes "condescend," a word that quietly contains "descend." Even while it passes for politeness, it draws a vertical line with the speaker above and the target below. It is also the longest, most polished word in the poem, and it sounds far more courteous than "hate" or "cheat." Condescension can pass for good manners, and the poem seems to place it last for that reason. The mildest-sounding member of the trio is not innocent.
The last word is "to," a preposition left hanging with nothing after it. Grammatically it is exactly right, since "condescend to" demands an object, but the object never arrives. The poem stops at the very spot where the target should be named. That gap does two things. It keeps the victim anonymous, which fits the poem's logic, since to the speaker the victim is only a role. It also pulls the reader in, because anyone who mentally completes the sentence has to decide who goes there.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It doesn't describe a persecution or tell a story. It lets a voice speak and trusts us to hear what is wrong with it. Judging by the title and the deadpan delivery, it reads as satire, though it never announces that, and the refusal to signal its tone is part of its force. The "us" could be a group, a class, or one smug mind talking to itself, and the habit it captures is easy to recognise: sorting people by what they can be made to serve, whether as an object of hatred, a mark or a lesser being to be graciously talked down to. Four lines are enough to leave the reader asking which role they would be handed and, more uncomfortably, which ones they have handed out themselves.