A poem we need to share from 1970
 

For the Student Strikers

Go talk with those who are rumored to be unlike you,
And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.
Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why
You are out on strike.

It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force.
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.

Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.
Yet here or there, it may be, there will start,
Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening,
Changes of heart.

They are your houses; the people are not unlike you;
Talk with them, then, and let it be done
Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff
And the guardsman's son.


Richard Wilbur

**** if applied to this moment.
These are people facing deportation, persecution based on skin, sexual orientation, and religion. This is a generation inheriting an environmental disaster from your generation's selfish squandering of ecological resources, stupid wars, and complacent ass kissing of corporate greed. This a generation facing the rollback of decency and shelter on multiple levels. When they start talking about deporting your wonderbread mothers and fathers, annulling your marriages, or putting your healthcare back into the hands of the health insurance leeches, bring your quiet discourse. I know how serious taxes on tea were back in the day compared to this stuff but you don't get to offer this cheap advice without a response.

Forty-six years and the "nightmare sheriff" is still with us. Sad, very sad...

Andrew:

You are proving my point.

Mike

I disagree with you, Andrew. This is exactly the time for the sort of discourse that has a hope of being listened to, and thus a hope of leading to "changes of heart".

Look at an example from the other side. Fred Phelps drove far more people away from his cause than he converted to it with his message of gay-hate. Likewise, those who hold "Love Trumps Hate" signs while demonizing bigots, racists, and homophobes in hateful terms convert no one from bigotry, racism, and homophobia.

Demonizing the other side DOES NOT WORK, no matter how just one's cause is. No human being is a demon beyond redemption. All human beings, on all sides of any issue, are prone to turning off their empathy when they feel threatened. So non-threatening persuasion and discourse--which is a two-way street, including each side listening to the fears and concerns of the other--is the only way to get others to turn that empathy back on again.

Non-violent protests need to use non-violent language, too (yes, even in a climate in which the media ignores protests until they have footage of something burning), if the protesters want to persuade their opponents that violence will not come to them if they cease hostilities. You can't change a heart that fears you. And you can't persuade someone that their fear of you is irrational if you are attacking them, whether literally or just verbally.

What was your point, Michael, that white poets have the luxurious choice of conversation?

Read another author's literary take on the outcome of this election

Greg

Gregory:

You're proving my point too.

By the way, both of you, my late father was 60% Hispanic and no one on my mother's side went to college before me, so you should cool both the privilege rhetoric and the ad hominem remarks about someone you don't know or understand.

Mike

Michael,

Not sure where you see the ad hominem remark. Your sensitivity proves your point as well. I live in a black/white family. I now have a neighbor who flies a confederate flag because of this election. How do I go over to that neighbor's house and start a conversation like the one Wilbur (and I presume you) are advocating for? And why is it that the minority has to be the one who knocks on the door?

Greg

My point--and Wilbur's--is that our democracy works better if we talk civilly to each other rather than ranting angrily. In my opinion, there are tens of millions of people--maybe more--of all points of view who should be accepting that premise.

I regret that you & Andrew don't share my opinion, and hope in time you see a need to change your rhetorical approaches.

[quote=I regret that you & Andrew don't share my opinion, and hope in time you see a need to change your rhetorical approaches.[/QUOTE]

Michael, please stop speaking to me as if I am Andrew. I agree with you about civil discourse. (Although I do find yours a bit condescending.) I am a college teacher, which means that it hasn't avoided me that we just elected the most uncivil candidate in our lifetimes. I, too, am struggling to find a way to communicate this outcome to my family and my students in a way that does not inflame but informs. It's still a work in progress, but thanks for your help.

Greg

Richard Wilbur's endnote on this poem in his Collected Poems 1943-2004 may be of interest:

By the way, there are some very good essays in the link Gregory P. provided, too, and I encourage people to check them out.

I wish Toni Morrison's essay didn't focus only on the most extreme cases of racism. Yes, doing so drives the point home that racism is horribly still present in modern American society, and a very serious, ugly thing. But it is dangerously easy for white readers to grade their own racism generously, on a curve skewed by such atrocities: "Yes, bombing and shooting up black churches certainly is terrible, but I'm not doing those things...so how dare anyone think I'm at all racist when I support the actions of my police force without question, and when I advocate the deportation of millions of people who don't look like me?"

As a Californian who is a big fan of John Chiang--obviously, I have a weakness for nerdy, Democratic, Roman Catholic, Chinese-American engineers, since I married one--my favorite was the essay by Evan Osnos titled "On Saying No."

I also found Jeffrey Toobin's essay, "The Highest Court," riveting. It included a very poignant simile:

But I'm digressing from Gregory's point.

Mary Karr's essay entitled "Donald Trump, Poet" makes much the same point I was trying to. Words matter.

Clearly she uses that image because she means us to admire words' power, whether used by poets or politicians or protesters. But it occurs to me that, like nuclear weapons, certain kinds of language (such as demonization of one's opponents, thus robbing them of their human dignity) should be regarded as toxic to both attacker and attacked, and as inviting retaliation. No one wins a nuclear war.

I like her last three paragraphs.

It seems to me that Wilbur’s poem is suggesting talking to fellow common citizens, without necessarily saying anything about protesting or not against citizens in powerful governing positions.

There's no question that a lot of people who didn't vote for Trump could gain understanding by talking to a lot of those who did, and vice-versa.

And I agree that the violence and the hateful slogans on the part of the protestors is actually harmful to their cause, and to people in general. They should imitate Gandhi instead; it would be far more effective for what they’re trying to accomplish.

But also, Michael, you know there are great examples in poetry for speaking out, forcefully and even contemptuously, against abusive power. E.g., this famous scene from Dante’s Paradiso (canto 17, lines 124-35), where Dante’s great-great grandfather Cacciaguida encourages Dante to speak his mind fearlessly and without holding anything back against the corrupt and powerful of his day:

If Dante had done what Wilbur suggests, there would be no Divine Comedy. There’s a time to denounce, forcefully, what seems unacceptable or repugnant. Some might argue that this isn’t one of those times, but a lot of people clearly feel that it is.

Michael,
You posted a poem and linked it to a specific moment in history. I called ****** on the implied suggestion that what these people need to do is calm down and go door to door talking to their opponents. I have absolutely no idea who you who are or what your genetic background is. Your idea is the target.
This is not a case of a populace who need to hear the truth to understand a viewpoint they are unfamiliar with. This is a protofascist where the deportation of millions is being discussed, hate crimes are soaring not in isolation but in homage to an election. This is the election of a man hailed by the Klan. This is moment when an openly played video tape of the future president speaking of sexual assault and misogyny did nothing but increase the vigor with which people voted for him. That so many hid their preferences before the election only underlines their knowledge of what they were accepting. This is an election that traumatizes victims of assualt with a symbolic promotion of their attackers. This is an election that will gut the few environmental safeguards we have left, an election of a evil clown car cabinet that now includes a Goebbels-like propagandist
as its chief adviser as if underlining the sort of **** this government will need to mask its intentions.

All this is not only door-to-door already, it is common knowledge injected into their cellphones and facebook feeds. This is not a crowd that is being moved by a napalmed photo of a small girl in the streets of Southeast Asia, that as they see the truth is overcome with remorse. This is a crowd salivating for revenge against imagined sleights done to their whiteness and their rightness by brown people, gay people, Muslims...hell...almost anybody but themselves and as they vote against their own healthcare and food stamps they even vote down their own social safety net.

Btw, it doesn't matter if your grandfather was Caesar Chavez and your mother lives in Tehran. If you are not going to openly oppose this stuff with the same fire and clarity as the folks who are bringing it, then your just another complicit huero writing everything-is-alright-checks out of somebody else's account.

Greg,
My apologies for you being confused with me. You seem a calm, reasoned fellow and that was most unfair. Ha!

Interesting note, Julie. Whether Wilbur can be taken seriously as a poet with a conscience regarding those events depends on what else he did to oppose the murderous War in question. If he simply wrote that and nothing else then I wouldn't think much of it. I have zero knowledge and zero opinions about him or his work. I would be happy to hear about his poetry in the face of all that blood.

It's a rather dull poem, isn't it, quite apart from its message? Well crafted, of course, but unlikely to become anyone's favorite. (Unlike Orwn, I do find many Wilbur poems to be quite wonderful. Off the top of my head, The Pardon, Loves Calls Us to the Things of This World, The Undead, Boy at the Window, An Event, The Barred Owl, all are among my favorite poems).

As far as its message is concerned, I don't see that the strikers are being criticized very much at all. Wilbur is not calling upon them not to strike, just to say why they are on strike. The only criticism of the strikers is the suggestion that they need his advice, since presumably the student strikers themselves were hoping through their strike to stimulate discourse and convince people of the correctness of their views.

As Roger says, it is dull. Wilbur rarely excites me, and in this case his constant need to be smooth, or for his technique to be seamless, works against the poem (I would say it always works against his poems).

I will also add that anger is a perfectly acceptable reaction to this election, as is more subdued discourse. Both are needed, the former to fight against the complacency we slide into if we accept the unacceptable. Juster's response is tone deaf no matter how deep he dredges his genes (ooo! 60% hispanic!) when Trump has just appointed a white supremacist to his cabinet.

These calls to civil discourse only (as opposed to civil discourse and anger) are always hypocritical: notice, for instance, that a mere mention of Juster's whiteness has him crying ad hom, yet he expects those who have so much more to lose should muster the utmost restraint and simply talk it out. Rage, rage against the dying of your rights.

Of course, old heterosexual white guys have nothing of value to say, ever, and no one should listen to them, ever, because they never, ever, go through anything even remotely distressing in their lives of uninterrupted privilege.

But if, in our magnanimous tolerance, we are able to set down our buckets of tar and pillowcases of feathers for a few minutes, the following observations of Richard Wilbur regarding political poetry and Vietnam may be of passing interest to some.

From an interview published in the Paris Review in Winter 1977:

I was going to quote just the Vietnam bit, but I like Wilbur's answer to the previous question too much to keep it to myself:

From an interview at Furman University in February 1970, published in the South Carolina Review in November 1970. (The Kent State shootings were in May.)

Both interviews above were reprinted in Conversations with Richard Wilbur, ed. William Butts (University Press of Mississippi, 1990).

Julie, no one here is saying what you posit in your first paragraph.

Circus Maximus
 

My own meditations
Reading Marcus Aurelius
Contemplating Cosmic Truths
Within all of us.

In our Circus Maximus
Blue blood ran Red
The Great Race ended
Democracy bled.

The Mob enraged
With furious release
Cursed the Republic
Damned poets of peace.

In a hundred years
None of us will remain
Of stoic White
Or godly Green.

No dust of any color
Will sing one refrain
Of our Circus Maximus
In Twenty Sixteen.

Stephen

At the risk of being accused of trivializing it with mere pop music, I'm going to unofficially merge this thread with the 'RIP Leonard Cohen' one. This song seems particularly apposite to the discussion. I've been singing it all week...

https://youtu.be/ncdY2nGKzBs

I think this Leonard Cohen song more on point. This is a cover by a great band.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRHJiqfwnac

The actions of the present (especially when it comes to the deforestation, mass extinctions, and changes of the chemistry of the sea from the now fully operational Anthropocene epoch) will be spoken of for centuries, or at least the ripples of our selfish stupidity ringing out from here will be. This Circus is gonna leave mark much more noticeable than two vast and trunkless legs in the sand.

Andrew M., the Eisenstein essay you linked to, before you deleted the post, in the General Talk thread, was eloquent on the need to avoid demonization. I copied this bit from it: “It is time to stop feeding hate. Next time you post on line, check your words to see if they smuggle in some form of hate: dehumanization, snark, belittling, derision.., some invitation to us versus them.”

Trump is the arch-demonizer, often flagrantly accusing his enemies of his own sins, thereby exposing the psychological dynamic of demonization: i.e., a projection of one’s own unconscious faults onto others. Trump is so unconscious of his own processes that his whole personality is effectively structured around demonization. It is all too easy to demonize Trump in turn, but the dynamic is the same. It just reinforces the destructive pattern. The trick is, to discover a truly constructive alternative.

Eight years ago, Obama’s election evoked a wave of hopefulness, much as the fall of the Berlin Wall had done years before. Things are going in the right direction! Everything is going to be OK after all! What a relief! But it was just a swing, in one direction, of the pendulum. Now it swings the other way. Rejoicing in one direction, lamenting the other, is a sucker’s game. The pendulum itself is the problem. If you identify with its motions, you are part of the problem. The trick is, to discover an emotion, a motivation, which is not identified, is independent. I think Wilbur, in his way, is trying to do this, not only in the quoted poem but in all his work. It’s one of the tasks of poetry, as opposed to rhetoric.

Alder (or Julie or Mike), can you give an example of protest or criticism that doesn’t involve some form of “us versus them” perspective? To critique or protest is to argue your point, and if your point involves something as important as environmental survival or the political/social equilbrium of the world, it's going to be passionate. Forceful criticism or even denunciation isn't the same as “dehumanization, snark, belittling, derision.” But it does mean opposition or challenge.

Andrew – Yes, The Partisan is a beautiful song. My choice of LC song felt relevant not so much to the recent events themselves, but to the discussion about how one should best react to these events: the topic of this thread in other words. The lyric ‘There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t’ could summarise the discussion in a nutshell.

My feeling, from across the pond and for what it’s worth, is that Trump is an obnoxious bully driven by pathological narcissism and utterly unfit to be president. He’s uninformed, irrational, misogynistic and a proven liar. I don’t think he’s a fascist; that would credit his unpleasantness with too much ideological purity. I think he’s an insecure, power hungry opportunist who wants to show he can be ‘the best’ at whatever he turns his hand to, including politics, and he decided the way to do this was to appeal to the ugliest, basest form of scapegoating and populism. And goodness, it worked. Somewhere in his dark heart a part of him is probably as surprised as anyone.

But. He was democratically elected. Unlike the protests against the Vietnam war which form the context of Wilbur’s poem, it was the people who made this decision, not the government. Of course those who didn’t vote for him are angry; the fact this dangerous fool is going to be your president is a fact that would be funny if it weren’t terrifying. It makes the writing of dystopian satire redundant. But rather than labelling those who did vote for him as racist bigots (I know people here aren’t doing that but many on the left are prone to that knee-jerk response) Democrats/the left/liberals in general should be asking not ‘why he won’, but why they lost. After all, many Obama voters must, statistically, have turned to Trump, so charges of simple racism won’t wash.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/08/politi...ire/index.html

I don’t blame people for protesting, for ‘us v them’ anger and waving ‘not my president’ banners. But when that subsides, then what? Basically, the left needs to get its act together. And as The Democratic Party is the only viable, government-ready representative of the left in the US then they have to give people something passionate and inspiring to believe in, and deliver it in a way that emphasises (forgive me) ‘hope not hate’. But that means everyone: including people without college degrees, old white guys with slightly old fashioned attitudes to race and gender, people who are scared of Islamic fundamentalism and want a leader who isn’t shy about even using that phrase, people in communities whose industries have been decimated. Imperfect people, in other words, who just voted for Donald Trump. The Democrats chose Clinton over Sanders, it clearly thought the status quo was going to walk this one. It was wrong, wasn’t it?

So – Yes, protest, have an angry moment, exercise your right to dissent. Then calm down, regroup, and start knocking on doors. What’s the alternative?

Yes, I agree that many Trump voters were not racists or misogynists, but it's also true that they were nonetheless perfectly willing to overlook the fact that their candidate was.

Yes they were. But, beyond being a disturbing indictment of the human species, how is that a productive line of argument? If anything it strengthens the idea that the left needs to be providing something more than it clearly is at the moment.

Mark,

History is littered with men who have risen to power while good, simple folk just wanted change. It remains to be seen how those good, simple folk will react when they get the change they didn't vote for. Including the military, there are over 4 million people who work for the U.S. federal government. We'll see how many John Chiang's there are once this ball gets rolling.

My first reaction to the poem in question was that Wilbur's poem was naive and surprising for someone who experienced WWII so profoundly. However, as Nicholas Butler says, optimism is the foundation of courage. It's my hope that Wilbur's poem was expressing the need for courage rather than the luxury of conversation.

Courage from a lot of people is what I'm hoping for over the next four years. This could be a time when the beacon of progress shines from its heart again rather than from its head. Courage: that's what's wanted and that's what's needed.

Cheers,
Greg

Understand, I'm not saying people on the left should just stop moaning and put up with it. These are not normal events you're dealing with here. A man like Trump, in any sane democracy, shouldn't be anywhere near the White House. I don't know enough about the political system in the US, but if there was any way to prevent that from happening in January I'd hope people would be all over it.
I'm just saying the left needs to be very proactive now, not just reactive.

Greg: was cross posting there. I agree. Heart and head are needed equally I think.

Yes, I know. No one [here] is saying what you posit, either--i.e., that all forms of angry protest should be condemned, and only "quiet discourse" is allowed. The poem certainly doesn't say that. How can the students explain why they are on strike if they are only explaining, and not striking?

Anyway, it's time to stop yelling at each other, and start trying to join forces in the many areas in which unity is possible. Trump might actually keep his promise to unify the country, despite himself, by unifying us against his unacceptable policies and appointments.

Americans overseas, please ask your American hometown newspapers if they'd be interested in publishing an op-ed piece by you, from your unique perspective.

Americans in the States, please take a few minutes to add the phone numbers of your Members of Congress and Senators to your phone, if they aren't already there. Call their district offices to register your displeasure about the counter-productive appointment of Steve "Turn On the Hate" Bannon, and to encourage them to join bipartisan efforts to get Trump to rescind it. Follow up next week to thank them for their action, or let them know you're still concerned.

Also write a brief letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Even if they don't print yours--and my local paper has never printed any of mine over the years--this is not wasted effort, because the editors take the overall volume of mail on an issue into account when choosing how many letters pro and con to print. Every letter on your side helps win additional column inches for your side.

Get ready to repeat this process many, many times over the next four years--in addition to whatever other forms of protest you may be doing.

Self-therapeutic expressions of anger against partial allies may feel good in the moment, but they undermine the groundwork for future joint efforts. We won't be able to find common ground on every single thorny issue, but we do need each other if we're going to get our country through this.

“When millions of people stand up and fight back we will not be denied,” says Bernie Sanders in this video done after the election. The Bern lives.

As a footnote to this thread, I’ll add that when I was reflecting on it yesterday, I finally realized (I’m a bit slow in realizing things) why I reacted against the message of Wilbur’s poem and Michael’s comment, in the present context.

Mike wrote: My point--and Wilbur's--is that our democracy works better if we talk civilly to each other rather than ranting angrily.

But I think this is setting up two false equations: calm = civil, and anger = ranting.

I remember from previous posts, Mike, that you’ve recommended the Aristotelian golden mean for debate and discussion, pointing out (rightfully) that blow-out anger doesn’t in fact mitigate anger. It only spreads it. This is true.

But Aristotle also granted a place to controlled, articulate anger and polemic (which is where Dante is coming from, btw, in that passage I quoted). Among the valid emotional responses he named, one is righteous indignation.

And I think that’s exactly the emotion that meets what has just happened in this election and what is still happening as Trump selects his advisors.

It’s not the doors of voters I need to knock on, since they’re not the ones I’m incensed at. The door of Trump Tower would be the one to knock on. But I and others can’t do that.

So my position is that, figuratively speaking, I’m outside the door of Trump Tower, not to discuss anything, but to give him a piece of my mind for what he is inflicting on us collectively. And to protest his policies in whatever way I can.

I accept that the unnecessary adverb "angrily" may have confused my message. For the record, I'm all for passion in public discourse--including passion driven by anger. I just don't condone verbal or other bullying.

How amnestic time is. Barack Obama has, in a hundred different ways on a thousand different occasions, urged, inspired, even implored us to engage in conversation, discourse, tolerance, empathy and compassion with each other in order to move the needle towards a more perfect world. Those things are not easy to do in the best of times. They are essential to do in trying times like these. One sure way of making Obama’s legacy vanish into the ether is to use certitude as a shield rather than summon the better angels of our nature to advance human decency. Yes, now is the time. This is the place. We are the ones.

Now, rake me over the coals, if that be your will. (That's a little bit of Leonard Cohen : )

Rake you over the coals? Quite the opposite.

This country is in as dark and angry a mood as I have known in my life. Unless we start talking to each other instead of past each other, I'm afraid we will come apart -- which would be fine, if coming apart were not so often steeped in blood.

I think that's why MLK, our American prophet, said that evolution is better than revolution.

Thank you, Michael. I had never seen this one of RW's before.

Mike, I am intrigued by your original post. You are, from what I read about you, known for your Republican beliefs. I can't say that is wrong.

That said, I remember a lot of Republican anger in 2010 against Obama and the ACA spill out...as the Tea Party manifested itself into our consciousness, well known Republicans like Colin Powell told the Tea Partiers that mere anger for anger's sake wasn't the solution. Republican anger has continued to swell as Obama pushed through much of his agenda.

Now the left and the Democrats are returning the favor.

The next few years will be interesting, no doubt.