Here’s a prose poem about how politics have failed us, partly because we are often powerless, and partly because we don’t care enough, though, fortunately, there will always be individuals, like the Lakota teenagers in this prose poem, who have the guts to keep up the fight.
Words of Wisdom from the Lost Land between Your Ears
My father once said, “I alone beweep my outcast state.”
Okay, he never said that, but at least it’s a place to start.
Better than those lyrical hip thrusts that, in my humble opinion, weigh down a poem like huge blocks of flesh the unimaginative call whales.
But here’s something that’s true.
Last night I read about a Lakota teenager who’s more than happy to freeze her ass off in a tiny canvas tent to protect us from extinction.
Makes me want to get on a plane and fly west, open my ’60s war chest and reclaim my mukluks and cowboy hat I bought on opening day of Disney World.
Which was on October 1, 1971, if you’re interested.
It’s funny how you can fashion yourself a hero of the proletariat or a philosopher king for only so long.
Then age sets in and you become as slow-witted and boring as a Neanderthal staring endlessly into his sacred fire.
I’d like to tell this girl that you don’t have to be standing next to a horse to hear its weeping.
I want to take a deep breath and say, “I don’t know what’s holding us up, but I trust it will stand firm.”
Which is of course claptrap.
Because we know the pipes will be shipped, and the crude oil will flow under rivers like a black alien virus.
We know it can’t be stopped, any more than these Lakota teenagers will be stopped—their campfire faces stubborn as stars that dutifully watch over us no matter how stupid we are.
Because politics is such a tribal sport today, I have been hesitant to jump into the fray in these essays. I also have no desire to be trolled by angry old white guys with more grievances than my three-year-old nephew, or by twenty-something unemployed whiners living in their mom’s basement, surrounded by 30 empty cans of Red Bull and instruction manuals on how to make a pipe bomb. I also fear that some dope will delve into my past and discover that I had to be sent home in third grade for wetting my pants. Oh, no, now it’s out there now. I wonder if pants-wetting precludes anyone from becoming president.
But, wait! Anyone can run for president nowadays. It’s just a matter of getting people angry and finding a running mate. Maybe my 5-year-old black pug can man up for the job, or how about the lawyer I spoke with at Cumberland Farms who believes Jeffrey Dahmer was framed, arguing that he couldn’t have been a cannibal because he was a vegan, which he read on some guy’s site who lives in a treehouse in the Everglades.
Whether you like or dislike Donald Trump, you can’t deny that he’s changed the behavior of white guys in this country, especially old white guys who should know better. But I don’t want to spend a tremendous amount of time demonizing Trump. He does too good of a job himself. I’m more interested in what he represents, and why it’s so attractive to working-class, middle-class, and upper-class white guys.
I feel uniquely qualified to take on this impossible task because of my background, which forced me to straddle the fine lines between the above classes, with both heels resting precariously on banana peels. I was raised working class but was smart and athletic enough to get a scholarship to a premier Catholic high school where I dated rich girls and eventually married one, which gave me entry to country clubs. On top of that, I ended up being an English professor, so I spent most of my life in that liberal, intellectual world Republicans often demonize, unless they were educated in it, or are looking for a donation.
I am sure if any working-class white guys read this, they will think I am just another crazy, woke liberal professor, but, in reality, I’ve never fit into academia. I love talking about ideas. I love stimulating the minds of young people, and most of my colleagues were terrific people, but I was often discouraged and amused by the lack of common sense I found there. The perfect example occurred at a department meeting where we anal professors (me included) argued for half an hour about punctuation in a course description proposal. It was as painful as that moment after a TURP operation when the nurse shoves a catheter up your penis that’s the width of a huge Crayola crayon.
If you don’t know what a TURP operation is, that’s probably a good thing.
I also didn’t fit in at the country club. Yes, I was tall, blondish, blue-eyed and athletic. In short, I looked like them. But it was always clear to me that I could never think like them. In the beginning of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Rich Boy,” the narrator says:
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.”
This is, of course, a generalization but not far off from what I have witnessed most of my life.
So what am I?
I am certainly not a Republican, a Democrat, or even an Independent. I am a humanist, as I have argued in an earlier essay. And, in my heart, I will always be a South Buffalo Irish working-class guy. I cannot win being in this category. My wealthy friends argue that I am too sophisticated to be working-class, because they believe class comes with education and a decent salary. My academic friends insist I “educated myself out” of the working class. This snobbery suggests that the working class is intellectually deficient or mentally challenged–the cure being a rigorous study of the Great Books and talking periodically like a fool. And my working-class friends joke that I am a pretender, trying to be tough when, in fact, I am just an elite, intellectual wimp.
The working-class guys are more wrong about me than the rich guys and academics. My values and my moral compass are solidly working class. I was taught to work hard and try to be decent. I also know what it’s like to be looked down upon by both the rich and the highly educated. When I was nineteen, I dated an extraordinarily beautiful rich girl. Her father liked me. After all, I was good-looking, a good golfer, and a pretty good conversationalist. Consequently, I was surprised when, one fall afternoon, he summoned me to his study and said, “Peter, you’re a good guy, but I don’t think this will be a marriage made in heaven.”
“Right now, sir,” I responded, “I’m thinking more week-to-week.”
He grimaced. He squirmed. His jaw tightened, distorting his face as if every troubled nerve ending of every tooth in his mouth had suddenly come alive. Meanwhile, the picture of Jack Nicholas hanging on the wall above his head seemed to shiver a bit. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I thought old Jack was enjoying this conversation.
Her father took a deep breath, “I don’t think you know what I mean, son.”
“I guess not, sir,” I lied, “but I’m all ears because I really want you and the missus to like me.”
The “missus”? I was enjoying this now, but it was clear that he was done with pleasantries.
“Let’s put the rubber to the road,” he said. “There’s probably a good future for you out there somewhere, but I had hoped for a better match for my daughter than someone with your current, let’s say, ‘goals.’”
I had decided to forgo college and work in the steel plants.
There was little bit more conversation—he wondering if I were too thick to understand his drift, me, pretending to be as clueless as Bill Clinton when he said, “I did not have sex with that woman.”
And then, (drumbeat) he implied that if I quietly bowed out, he might just be able to get me four new tires for my 1959 Rambler American.
It was an interesting proposition. I needed the tires, and he wasn’t offering lousy retreads.
I have never forgotten the humiliation of this experience because I knew the real reason he wanted me to disappear. My father was a mailman during the day and he rode the crane at the steel plant in the evenings. Her father couldn’t wrap his head around that. My father’s choices didn’t suggest hard work to him; they symbolized laziness and lack of ambition. And here I was following in my father’s footsteps.
Looking back, I still get angry when thinking about this incident. I also feel bad because I ended up staying with his daughter for a year, and I often wonder if I did that more to spite him than because I was in love with her. Probably worst of all, I never got those tires.
Unlike my girlfriend’s father, academics never questioned my intellectual pedigree on economic grounds. One reason my father had worked two jobs was so that I could get highly educated at premier Jesuit high school. I took seven courses per semester, none of which was gym. I studied French, Latin, and classical Greek. Because of this education, many academics and even graduate students often expressed surprise that I didn’t “talk” like a classical scholar. If there had been an internet then, I would have typed: “How To Talk Like a Classical Scholar.”
In fairness to them, I often used street slang, probably because it was my way of not relinquishing my working-class roots. But it was also fun to undermine their high-minded pretentiousness and complex theories by countering them with simple explanations spoken in simple language. Even now whenever I hear someone using a Latinate word when a simple Anglo-Saxon one will do, and every time I overhear an academic correct someone’s pronunciation of a word, I sense the presence of crippling insecurity in the room. Academia is loaded with brilliant minds and dedicated teachers, but there are also a number of ideologues, ready to promote an idea at any cost, even if it lacks common sense.
So, my friends, that’s the short version of my white-guy credentials. Keep it in mind as I try to answer in the next essay, “Whatever happened to white guys?”
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 Old Man Howling at the Moon
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
great bit about the tires in there! Made me remember my fiance's father about marrying her, and he advised me to get it done before she changed her mind. She did, and I didn't—which, as it turned out, was the right result. Sometimes fathers do know.