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—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 finding a running mate. Maybe my 8-year-old grandnephew 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, but I was often discouraged and amused by the lack of common sense among my colleagues. The perfect example occurred at a department meeting where we anal professors (me included) argued for a half an hour about the placement of a semicolon in a course description. It was as painful as that moment after a TURP operation when a nurse unclogs the catheter jammed up your penis that’s the width of one of those Jumbo Crayola crayons.
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.
Fitzgerald’s description 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. But, socioeconomically, I am a solid South Buffalo working-class slob.
[See this short piece about my past as a steelworker and drywall subcontractor and how those jobs shaped my life as a writer Truscon: A Division of Republic Steel]
I cannot win being in this working-class 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 working class guys are 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 to 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, and me, pretending to be as clueless as Bill Clinton when he said, “I’ve never had sex with that woman.”
And then, (drumroll) 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 that 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. He couldn’t shake the nightmare vision of three young grandchildren covered in the black soot from Bethlehem Steel as they sat in different corners of the kitchen munching on SpaghettiOs.
Looking back, I still get angry when I think about this incident. I also feel bad because I ended up staying with his daughter for a year, a decision which I probably made just to spite him. 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 where I matriculated with another working-class guy, Tim Russert. 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 surprised 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,” which would have led me to videos of old grey-haired white guys in tweed sportscoats, corduroy pants, and penny loafers telling me that I “talked like a cowboy.” (I was actually accused of that once by a Shakespeare scholar who himself smelled circa 1850s convict).
In fairness to snobs like this, 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.
I could go on and on about white-guy credentials, but I want to get to the “Trump Problem.” Just keep in mind what I have said above as I try to answer in the next essay, “Whatever happened to white guys?” That is, how did they get so angry and crazy?
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
Man, Bill, that's a great prose poem. Funny but spooky because of the perfect ending.
Here's a poem for you, Peter.
Political Man
Instead of a forehead, the Monopod is endowed with the determined prow of a shin. Ankle bones instead of ears flare attentively from a lean face. Teeth? Five ragged toenails. Here’s one who doesn't resent being called a heel. Left out? He kicks the door down. Uncertain of a position? He stamps out the opposition! Like a hat that’s too large, difficult questions are best danced around, at first slowly, then faster and faster. Right foot, left. Right! Left! Once the inhabitant of a land beyond the torn edge of the map, the end of knowledge, abode of our darkest fears, the Monopod has been realized in us. You think I’m talking about someone else.