Observations on Finger-pointing and Satire

A Guide for the Next Four Years

People, I truly understand everyone’s anger and frustration and depression over this election, but looking for culprits to blame is pointless. Yes, white straight guys (my demographic) are a bunch of pathetic whiners looking for someone to blame because their ED meds don’t work anymore or because their moms are finally making them move out of the basement; yes, it’s frightening that Trump’s antics with the microphone didn’t seal the deal with white suburban moms (or with anyone, for that matter); and I could go on and on.

But the reason for the loss is simple and it’s not Trump’s fault. He’s a genius at understanding the depth of darkness in the human heart and how to exploit it. Right now, and I hope it’s only for “right now,” there is a very, very large majority of Americans who have lost an agreed-upon moral center. Think of Donald Trump as a mirror. Look into it and you see half of America (or maybe yourself)—some mean-spirited, others just lost and confused and numbed by misinformation and their nightly streaming of the bazillion series on various platforms.

But the good news is that this a ripe time for satire, and that’s what I do. I watched Jim Jordan on TV yesterday, babbling as if he had just ingested a bottle of amphetamines (think Dennis Hopper’s monologue in Apocalypse Now). I thought of doing a caricature of him (a genre that mines exaggeration), but he had already done the work for me. Think of that for a moment. It’s an incredible accomplishment to become a caricature of a caricature.

My point is that comedy can change the way one sees the world and how people interact. As the poet Nicanor wrote: “Humor makes contact with the reader easier. Remember, it’s when you lose your sense of humor that you begin to reach for your pistol.”

Please accept the below prose poem in that spirit,. The poem makes fun of the upcoming Rapture that never quite seems to come, while also having fun with the first-person narrator, who certainly takes himself very seriously.

The Great Fire

Since our house was spared in The Great Fire I have been considered a holy man. It didn’t matter I almost drowned in a flood or was nearly devoured by a cloud of locusts. I’ve had my share of diseases, too, and once drove drunk off a cliff in Arizona. But I was spared in The Great Fire, and that made me holy. Yesterday, an old woman on a park bench asked me to cure her. “Of what?” “Of everything.” She wore a faded, blue-print dress and red socks, Christlike sandals. Perhaps she was Christ, since He frequently appears in various disguises. She was smoking a little cigar, insisting we had met last year, even though I was living in Arizona. But people have a thing about fire. I once read that “to produce fire in one’s own body is a sign that one has transcended the human condition,” but I had never swallowed a burning coal, handled a red-hot iron, or walked on fire. If anything, I had deliberately avoided The Great Fire, which I started to explain until I saw a puff of white smoke erupt from her nostrils, a hailstone the size of a baseball land at her feet.

[Poem from While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems While the Undertaker Sleeps ]

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss