Babies, Bathwaters, and Poets

by Maurice Fitznuggly

Turns out millennia are like presidents: The farther they recede into the past, the better they look.

Take the much-maligned Second Millennium for example. All those wars, plagues, genocides, revolutions, etc. Not much to write home about, it seemed at the time.

Now, plowing our way forward into Millennium No. 3, we’ve—surprise!—put on blinders, really efficient blinders that allow us to look only forward toward the ostensibly ever-brighter new days of Free Markets, Endless Technology, and (at least) a Corolla in every garage.

Whew. Such unhindered progress takes your breath away (as well as your rearward vision).

Of course, worrywarts we shall always have with us, the present lot being made up almost exclusively of persons alarmed about the planet’s A/C. Good on them, and more power to them.

But lately I’ve found myself thinking about roots, not of the genealogical sort but of the behavioral sort.

Yes, we do seem to be—slowly—awakening to certain impending climatic disasters of our own making. Other, less dramatic disasters continue to lie safely outside the range of our blinders.

1.
For example: Have you been to a Toys R Us lately? I recommend an unblindered trip, with one purpose: Count the number of war and war-like toys on offer.

You’ll need more than your own fingers and toes to do the tally. Way more.

With that number, which runs into the hundreds, in mind, let’s hearken back for a moment to days of yore in the misbegotten, just-lapsed millennium.

Remember the little war in Southeast Asia whose purpose was either to stop China/Russia from taking over or to enable the further oriental expansion of Exxon Mobil, Coca-cola, et al.

Of the many results of that foray, one of the most remarkable (and now forgotten) was a growing, virulent hatred of all war-related stuff. Nixon and his Congress stopped the draft. The United States stopped the war and withdrew.

And: wars toys vanished.

Got that? War toys vanished.

What’s going on? Here we are a few decades later mindlessly immersing the children in all manner of beliigerence, low- and high-tech. Listen carefully and you’ll hear nary a complaint.

Hmmmm. There went the baby. And the bathwater.

2.
Let’s try a different tack.

During the 20th century a number of oppressed and/or put-upon peoples revolted. Most, sadly, to little positive effect.

Two people, however, produced leaders who pondered the ways of the world and concluded that the best, indeed the only, way forward was non-violence.

Gandhi pulled it off in India. A few years later here came King, and managed the same unlikely, radical stunt in the United States. Both times the ploy worked.

Present-day reality check: The violent guys (both the terrorists and the responders who respond how? Why with a WAR on terror, of course) rule the roost. And who’s talking about Gandhi and King and their method? Who’s even remembering?

What baby? What bathwater?

3.
That’s all bigtime, geopolitical macro stuff, you say, beyond the ability of any of us to affect?

OK, let’s do micro.

Once upon a time, in Old-Millennium days, there was a guy who spent his life studying, well, himself, especially parts of his life that most people pretended didn’t exist or weren’t important: dreams, slips of the tongue, forgotten childhood traumas, etc. Cleverly, he concluded that a lot of our puzzling adult behavior begins to make sense if you posit a massive, culture-wide system of internal repression. Even if you have food, shelter, sex, and a job, if you do not deal constructively with the most basic human need, the need to love and be loved, all is lost.

Bah, humbug, right? Every Third Millennium body knows what a sexist, mechanist, self-deluded egoist Freud was, right?

No matter that he was human, all too human. No matter that he made mistakes. Above all, no matter that he touched on terrible, deep, long-hidden truths that when faced leave little room or time for the successful pursuit of Free Markets, Endless Technology, and (at least) a Corolla in every garage.

Result: a New Millennial culture based unashamedly on greed and its supposed infinite rewards. Both macro-leaders (presidents, prime ministers, etc.) and micro-leaders (parents, preachers, teachers, etc.) create wars and lives and on the unquestioned assumption that more is better. Period.

Bye-bye, Sigmund. Yet another baby out the window. Along with the bathwater.

4.
Irritated, dear Reader? Bored? It’s about to get worse. A lot worse.

If you thought my remarks about war toys, non-violence, and Freud were iffy, get a load of this:

The most dangerous act of defenestrating baby and bathwater, far worse for our future cultural health than any of the examples above, is what’s happened—take a deep breath—to—yet another really deep breath—poetry.

Yes, poetry.

Rarely a bigtime attention-grabber, still, poetry has had its moments. And its place. And what is its place? Well, as somebody with a big vested interest once pointed out, poets are nothing less than the true legislators of mankind.

In these 21st century days, that’s even more absurd than suggesting the Gandhi--or Freud--might have something vital to teach us.

Poetry? That’s what you suffer through in high school and college English classes and later skim past in The New Yorker. Q.E.D.

The terrible final truth is: it’s not the fault of the yahoo culture, which after all is never going to warmly embrace that which seeks to subvert it. No, the fault lies, Cassius, rather in the poets themselves, who have trundled off (mostly) to the safety of academe and (triple oxymoron alert!) creative writing classes.

Go against the grain and try reading contemporary poets. When it comes to subversive, foundation-rattling truths, in poetry these days, mum’s the word.

Oh, the mummed words are often quite lovely, sitting as the do amidst polished phrases and lovingly wrought tiny tropes and mammony metaphors. Learn to lie beautifully first to yourself and then to the world and if you happen to have the true gift of gab-on-paper, why you too can be called a poet and win prizes and run $200-million foundations in Chicago.

There goes another flying baby. Not to worry. It’s not very big. But I would try to get out of the way of the bathwater. It smells to high heaven.

END

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