Bill Scanlon

 

Counterinauguration: WARNING!
Reader discretion advised.

This message includes clearly visible syllabic feet of lines engaged in raw rhyme.

Some poets might be offended by the politics. Some Republicans might be offended that there is poetry.

It must be good though, because a line was misquoted on the front page of the Madison Capitol Times of January 21, 2001.

Remarks and a Poem for the Counterinauguration On the Library Mall, Madison, Wisconsin
Inauguration Day, 2001
by Bill Scanlon

Friends:

     One of the sad things, perhaps not the saddest, but sad, and terrible, at today's Inauguration in Washington was that the new President did not only fail to follow Presidents Kennedy, Carter and Clinton, twice, by not having a poet read poetry, along with men (they've all been men) of religion reading prayers, during the Inauguration there - that would have been bad enough - but he absolutely rejected even the thought. "It's too confusing." he said.

     Not just the President but his entire Party seems to loathe poetry. The conservative Tucker Carlson of CNN, an ardent Republican, when asked just after the Supreme Court had selected Bush to be President what he thought Bush should do at the Inauguration, said "Rule number one - always and everywhere - no poetry." The President's disdain for literature, and Republican mistreatment of the National Endowment for the Humanities for the last 20 years, indicate also their intense dislike of art of all kinds. One must wonder: Of what are they so afraid?

     Charles Simic, a poet who won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, had this to say recently about expressions of concern from colleagues around the country that there would be no poet on the stand today with the President, "I find it astonishing that anyone expected Bush to have a poet. I imagine he and most of his Cabinet have only the vaguest idea that there's such a thing as American poetry, and it has no interest for them. To be a lover of poetry is to be a traitor to the only things they care for: money, power, and the NRA."

     So it is a terrible thing, a matter that causes or should cause terror, that the current President and those around him and many of those all over in his Party do not share President Kennedy's view of poetry, the view he shared with an audience at Amherst College less than a month before Dallas. He said "When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses."

     Some leading poets around the country have expressed the fear that poets are the first of many who will be made invisible by President Bush II and his henchpeople. But today, at counterinaugurations like this all around America, poets are on the stand, poets are visible and poetry is being heard. We are making clear and loud that the sad and terrible things at the President's event, and the sad and terrible things those signify, will not make us invisible, will not make us quiet.

     So, to celebrate poetry as President Kennedy appreciated it, to celebrate the poets Robert Frost, James Dickey, Maya Angelou and Miller Williams, who have read poems from presidential inaugural stands, and to celebrate you for being here today, I offer this:

 

Today, Tomorrow

Mr. President, now you're in
as the Supreme Court's selection.
Though the truth remains you lost
last November's people's election.

You plead you are very very
conservative compassionate.
To most that's oxymoronic;
really, it's disingenuate.

You have called today, we have heard,
for caring and civility.
All we'd like to experience
are signs of real ability.

Mr. President, to call you that
makes us terribly wary:
How you, a frat boy, reached that place
is deeply flawed and scary.

We've heard that the last time you were there,
with your daddy, on that stand,
you still had some freshly bought coke
being warmed by your Bible hand.

You've said your youth to forty or so
was wooly and wildly wild.
We wonder though if even now
you can read better than a child.

Oh, the crowd there and some here shout
that I should be much more gracious!
Sir, I would try to, if only you
were acting less rapacious.

Yes, this is Inaugural Day,
so we now look toward tomorrow.
But let us be real: We do this
with considerable sorrow.

We do still heed the call, not long ago:
to do for our nation
and all our world all that we can,
regardless of situation.

We go, knowing well the greatest fear:
political fear itself;
with terrible challenges like
racism, war, and unjust wealth.

Yet like Franklin over ten score years past,
we see a rising sun:
We know what the President can't grasp:
We, the people, shall overcome.

© 2001 Bill Scanlon
wscanlon@execpc.com