Above: I suck at Photoshop
Town Hall’s favorite crazy lady, Mary Grabar, is at it again! This time out, she’s unleashed her patented Slovenian blend of being completely full of crap and making bizarre, unsupportable and frequently incomprehensible statements in service of what she seems to think is an extremely noble goal: getting her fellow female women to stop wetting themselves over Barack Obama. Mary, who was one of the women who found the sight of George W. Bush’s tackle box in a flight suit to be unnervingly sexy, is absolutely appalled at the notion that her fellow lay-teez are allowing their seats to be dampened over this licentious Negro, and she has discovered the ideal way to quell the tide of passion that might otherwise result in a darky being swept into the White House on a tide of musky vapors: poetry.
Let’s watch!
Who would have thought that the gender-barrier crusader Hillary Clinton would be in such a tight race against a candidate before whom young women swoon? Talk about vestiges of patriarchy! Nothing like this has been seen since Beatlemania.
Wow, way to capture the zeitgeist, Mary!
But we’re not talking about teenagers who have recently shed their bobby socks and bras, hoping for a world different from their mothers’. No, these are “grrrls” who play a tough game of soccer, trot the globe on spring break, and outperform their male peers academically. The boys have caught Obamamania, but it’s the “grrrls” who actually faint.
Here, Mary proves that, contrary to any opinion you might have formulated from her previous sentence, she actually has heard of some pop-cultural phenomena of more recent vintage than 1964. For example, she is vaguely aware that soccer might possibly be a hot women’s sport, that females are now occasionally allowed to travel for pleasure, and that, some decade or so ago, there was a thing called rioting grrrls or some such that seemed important to three or four of her students.
More than smelling salts navel and cleavage-baring damsels and their slacker hook-up partners need an airing out of the demagoguery that is cutting off their oxygen.
Uh…okay! Moving on.
They need poetry. They certainly have been fed steady doses of Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni. But such paeans to “multiculturalism” and female empowerment cut off the brain’s ability to reason.
Yes, reading the poetry of Negresses makes you stupid! THIS WOMAN IS A COLLEGE PROFESSOR, PEOPLE, SHE KNOWS WHEREOF SHE SPEAKS.
I would bet that none in the throngs that greet Barack Obama have read Allen Tate’s “The Man of Letters in the Modern World”
And if there’s one thing that marks you as a complete dupe, it’s lack of familiarity with a second-rate poet who plagiarized his most famous work and spent much of his career consorting with fascists (of the non-liberal variety).
or been exposed to his idea that the man of letters protects democracies from the excesses of democracy
That’s the problem with America today. Too much goddamn democracy.
Today’s fashion among poets is to indict the Bush administration with charges gleaned from The New York Times or MSNBC. The outpourings on the “horror of war” come not from those who have served in the military, but from those who copy sentiments from their peers’ Facebooks and get their cues from teachers.
Really, when you think about it, what anti-war poets have ever actually served in the military?
It is no wonder that Obama’s campaign slogan, “We are the hope that we’ve been waiting for,” appeals to adolescents. On the Huffington Post, where about a quarter of contributors appear to be at other times engaged in creative writing, a poet collected some “found poetry” from the Obama campaign trail. (“Found poetry” is a hot genre right now. I learned how to do it in a workshop where we were asked to randomly circle phrases from various newspapers and magazines and then string them together. You can also do it at home with word kitchen magnets.)
Mary Grabar, Trend-Spotter, having already learned of the riot grrrl movement, strikes again with the discovery of magnetic poetry! She is hoping, by summer of 2008, to learn about other cultural trends from 1994 and perhaps even beyond.
The educational system also has succeeded in wiping out positive traces of Western culture to ensure that undergraduates recognize no allusions.
Because you see our colleges and universities are dominated by Marxists who ensure that you can go through four years of college and never read any Shakespzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
It’s a pity, for a solid grounding in poetry would help young people recognize demagoguery. Warren’s poem “Infant Boy at Midcentury” (1956) expresses no particular event or politician but has the effect of being relevant to the current situation. Writing of his son’s birth, Warren states,
You enter at the hour when the dog returns to his vomit,
And fear’s moonflower spreads, white as girl-thigh, in dusk of compromise;
When posing for pictures, arms linked, the same smile in their eyes,
Good and Evil, to iron out all differences, stage their meeting at summit.
Obama’s promise to meet with our enemies, anyone?
I…what?
Warren, of course, diagnoses his age’s growing acceptance of relativism.
“His age”, of course, being 1956, which as anyone will tell you was a period in American history where the country was just overwhelmed with moral relativism. Anyway, that girl-thigh stuff is all well and good, but can’t we talk about dog vomit some more?
It would be well to revisit such poetry whose lasting power resides in its refusal to indict the particularly unpopular politics of the moment, but instead focuses on ideas, or verities, if you will. It would be well to tell college sophomores that the reference to the dog returning to his vomit comes from Proverbs, a very, very old “text” indeed. (“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” Proverbs 26:11).
In case you’re having trouble spotting Mary’s point through the thick fog of complete insanity radiating from her column, it is this: we must abandon poetry that criticizes unpopular contemporary politics, and instead embrace poetry that appeals to the eternal truths, such as the fact that dogs enjoy vomit.
At both community colleges and prestigious universities, the overwhelming majority of students have no clue where Warren got this line.
Someone get Dennis Prager on the phone and have him add “Does your college teach kids where the guy who wrote All the King’s Men got that boffo line about dog puke?” to his list of questions to ask admissions officers.
