He Do Polite In Different Voices Poem by gershon hepner

HE DO POLITE IN DIFFERENT VOICES


He do polite in different voices,
as well as those most impolite,
but whether Eliot's or Joyce's,
he's hesitant to start a fight,
believing he can reconcile
opposites which, diametric,
he brings together with a smile
and pressure that is barometric,
"baro" from the Greek word baros,
meaning heavy, even grave.
His politeness may embarrass
many whom he wants to save,
but that's the sort of problem you
must put up with when in the land
known for its waste that in his view
are castles built upon quicksand.

Inspired by an Op-Ed article in the 5/9/12 NYT, "Young Obama's Poetic Politics":

FEW people expect to see their undergraduate musings about modern poetry splashed across the pages of Vanity Fair for millions to read. But then, few people emerge from their college years to become president of the United States. So President Obama couldn't have been too surprised to see the new issue of that magazine carrying an excerpt from the journalist David Maraniss's forthcoming biography, "Barack Obama: The Story, " which featured a letter that Mr. Obama wrote to his college girlfriend in the 1980s, discussing the worldview of T. S. Eliot's poetry and prose….
More surprising still is to see the young Obama preferring Eliot's brand of conservatism to what he dismissively calls "bourgeois liberalism." At least, this will sound surprising to anyone who has been listening to the way Mr. Obama's opponents describe him, as an ultraliberal bent on uprooting the American way of life.
But Mr. Obama's sympathy with Eliot will make sense to anyone who has read "Dreams From My Father, " or listened to speeches like the one he delivered at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, when he pointedly blurred the line between liberal and conservative: "We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states."
One of the things that most excited writers and intellectuals about Obama the candidate in 2008 was his literary sensibility. In her essay "Speaking in Tongues, " the novelist Zadie Smith enthused about Mr. Obama's ability, in his memoir, to convincingly channel a wide range of voices: "Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, " and on and on. This gives him something in common with the author of "The Waste Land, " that chorus of disparate characters, whose working title was "He Do the Police in Different Voices."
But the affinity with Eliot goes deeper than mere style. Mr. Obama speaks respectfully of Eliot's "reactionary" stance, because he sees that "it's due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance." That is, Eliot, like so many of the greatest modern writers, thinks of liberalism as an inherently shallow creed, because of its inability to reckon with the largest things — death and the meaning of life. Since Hobbes, liberalism has been defined as a form of government designed to preserve us from violent death. But death, Eliot reminds us, can't be avoided, and the trivial concerns of everyday life are just a distraction from that ultimate truth.
That's the import of the mocking lines from the poem Mr. Obama cites, "Four Quartets": "O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, /The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, /The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters...."
It is rare for a politician to give the sense that he has genuinely encountered this kind of "fatalism, " or despair. After all, politics in a liberal democracy is all about the distribution of worldly rewards; to believe with Eliot that such rewards are essentially futile is to nullify the whole purpose of politics. Mr. Obama's ability to recognize the poetic truth of Eliot's conservatism, while still embracing the practical truth of liberalism, is what makes his letter not just a curiosity but also a hint at the complexity of his mature politics.


5/9/12 #10139