Broadly speaking, one’s expectations of political rhetoric is that, at its worst, it reduces complex argument to slogans and platitudes or, at its best, that it singles out constituencies and individual citizens in order to focus on the day-to-day concerns that society can address. I’m speaking of political rhetoric that highlights contemporary American stories that are, on the one hand, connected to the stories of Americans throughout our history and that, on the other hand, inspire and inform and lead to the making of improved public policy.

And, again broadly speaking, I suppose one’s expectations of a poem in a public space is that it mythologizes experience and transforms ideas into metaphor, at its best, or that it transforms the ambitions of the one as representative of the many. This second characterization has certainly been the story of American poetry ever since Walt Whitman (another gay poet associated with a president from Illinois) wrote the following:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

But those two expectations — generalizations as they are — got flipped. The president’s speech was the poetry of connection and “consent,” as in Jefferson’s idea of the “consent of the governed.” It was a poetry of connection in terms of Whitman’s idea of “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” in which Obama ties his ambitions to those of everyday citizens (for a great take on this thinking, read Wendy Willis’s “Throwing Down the Gauntlet for Citizenship”). In the president’s speech, he leads us back to the founding document favored by Abraham Lincoln — the Declaration of Independence as opposed to the Constitution. Obama connects our contemporary lives as individuals with the “self-evident” truths that we are not only equal but that, as Whitman will say in his elegy for Lincoln, we are also “companions.”

On the other hand, Richard Blanco’s poem was the poetry of private lives, a catalogue of existences in which the politically-charged myth of his private story is individuated and highlighted (my father, my mother) and concludes with a platitude, a slogan: “hope — a new constellation / waiting for us to map it, / waiting for us to name it — together.”

Others have weighed in on the merits of Blanco’s poem. I’m really not game to do that. It’s not like Beyonce had to write a new song for the inauguration. She got to sing one everybody already knows by heart. It was a big-hearted poem. But, fair to say, “One Today” is not a a public poem. It’s a poem of private experiences spoken in a public forum. Carol Rumens at The Guardian calls it, at best, “valiant.”

Over on the Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan brings some across-the-pond enthusiasm for Blanco’s poem. Except for Sullivan’s embarrassing bed-wetting after the debate in Denver during the 2012 general election, Sullivan is usually an accurate and compelling thinker. His September 2012 piece on Obama’s transformative presidency is thoughtful. He’s certainly prolific.

But that fecundity sometimes leads him off course because in cheering Blanco’s poem as Whitmanesque, he misses the essential difference between the passage he quotes by Blanco and the one by Whitman.

Blanco:

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

Whitman:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or
at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of
the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

In Blanco’s passage, his focus is on the hands that belong to individuals, hands that glean and dig and are worn. The hands are symbols for the Americans who go about their daily jobs. These depictions are isolated, individual dramas, such as the one Blanco mythologizes about his father’s hands and how his fathered wonderfully cared for his children. This is a singular, private, standard sort of contemporary American poetry of the self.

In the Whitman passage, everyone is singing individual songs. But, here’s the important fact, they are singing them together. That’s what Whitman hears when hears “America singing.” I mean, he doesn’t hear “Americans singing.” It’s e pluribus unum. That’s the essential difference Sullivan misses.

And that’s what Obama also understood and accomplished in his speech as well. He both hears and sings with America. He does not separate himself from us. His is a poem to an America that includes both him and us. It’s a hymn to the collective, the “you and I.” Americans together. Not separate. For this reason, among others, Obama’s 2nd inaugural may well be remembered and recalled by Democrats for generations. It’s a clarion defense of the legacy of the New Deal and the New Frontier. It’s the poetry of democratic liberal governance.

But I’ve got to ask: Are we American poets ever going to unsnap our art from the self? I’m not saying we should. Just wondering if we are able to. I’ve got to believe the answer is yes. (And, don’t get me wrong: I believe too that every poet should write whatever kind of poem he or she wants. It’s none of my business. But when a poet writes a poem for the nation, well…then it is my business to have an opinion.) Given the opportunity, our Inaugural Poets (save Frost’s recitation of “The Gift Outright”) have lugged the individual onto the west side of the Capitol and trotted out their catalogues of selves. Even they’ve misread Whitman.

I want to give voice too to a nagging question from the quarter of poets who believe no poet should participate in public rituals like inaugurations when the government is involved in war, drone attacks, torture, and other like acts. They ask: Are these poems simply propaganda in service of immoral government? I’m not of this opinion. I think poets should be included in public ceremonies and ought to figure out how to do it better, do it in a way that honors both the public and the poem.

Finally, John F. Kennedy, who inaugurated the custom of inviting a poet to read at presidential inaugurations, once said, “When power leads man to arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.” Two days ago, not literally but largely, it seemed to me like it went the other way around.

Related Posts:

• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Viva Richard Blanco!
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Bruce Lee’s Advice to Poets
• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
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“But if I vote for Nader,” I said, “and Bush wins, I’ll never forgive myself.” I leaned my head against John’s shoulder. His hoodie smelled like oregano.

“You have to be brave to make change,” he said. “If we want better options, we have to demand them.”

I looked up at John. He’d recently bleached his hair, and the newly yellow spikes stuck out like fresh hay from his forehead. “Maybe,” I said and kissed him on the cheek. Later that night, alone in my dorm, I cast my vote and sealed the envelope. I agreed with John’s critique of the two-party system, but I wanted my vote to be more than symbolic. I wanted to be on the side of the winner.

 ***

I now teach freshmen at Xavier University, a historically black college in New Orleans, and though the class I teach is English, we spent a good portion of last semester sidetracked by politics. For the majority of my students, the 2012 presidential election was the first time they got to go to the polls. After each debate, we discussed the candidates. Romney used sentimentality more than Obama. Obama preferred statistics and numbers, logic. We compared Romney’s smile and Obama’s smile. “Why can’t Obama just get angry?” I asked.

Because then he’d be an angry black man, my students told me. Nobody listens to angry black men.

Most of the time when I teach, I’m the only Caucasian in the room. My students and I laugh often at what our different perspectives have taught us.

We talk about early voting and local amendments and voter suppression and mail-in ballots and the Electoral College. “If that’s how it works,” a young woman asked, “then why should I vote? If my state’s going to go red anyway, what’s the point?”

 ***

On December 12, 2000, the Supreme Court declared in a 7–2 vote that a recount of Florida’s ballots was unconstitutional, and though he lost the popular vote, George W. Bush was declared the president-elect based on the Electoral College. Afterward, independent organizations including the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago examined Florida’s ballots and concluded that the results would’ve been reversed had a reliable and uniform system of counting been employed.

At 2:00 am on January 20, John and I boarded a bus from Poughkeepsie, New York, to Washington, DC, to attend Bush’s inauguration. In the streets of our nation’s capital, a man dressed in black climbed a streetlight and chanted democracy-themed rhymes. Six young men lifted a parked Mazda and moved it into the street. Women dressed as caribou banged plastic buckets with spoons. Babies cried. John and I held hands and ran. Cold winds whipped frozen rain into our eyes. We’d become part of a pack. Our animal selves stampeded through caution tape, climbed fences, jumped on car bumpers. At one point, I looked to my left and saw my former Sunday-school teacher shoving aside a plastic barricade, howling obscenities at the sky. His face twisted in anger. Cops were everywhere. We were playing capture the flag for our nation’s future, and for a split second, we were having so much fun, we thought we were winning.

In the afternoon, we left the running mob and ducked into a diner for warmth and cheap lunch. We barely had enough change between us for a shared hot drink. In the distance, women in fur coats and men in ten-gallon hats gathered to applaud our new president. Refueled and slightly less frozen, we shuffled and shoved our way onto some metal bleachers. The motorcade inched toward the National Mall. We could see Rudolph Giuliani in a glass box across the street. He looked comfortable behind his safety glass, surrounded by men in suits. When Dubya drove past, we wailed like sirens. The new president stopped waving and rolled up his window. He continued on to the White House.

***

In my classes at Xavier, my students and I pondered potential outcomes for the 2012 election. “There’s a possibility,” I told my students, “that Romney might win the popular vote and Obama, the electoral vote. If this happened, it would be a repeat of the Bush/Gore election, but in reverse.” In 2000, I was furious about the Electoral College. This past October, it was my fallback hope.

 ***

“Two states legalized marijuana,” a student shouted when I got to class the day after the president’s reelection.

“Ganjaaa,” a young woman in pigtails moaned. She put her face in her hands. “They’re going to ruin it.”

The university had hosted a party in the campus ballroom the night before, providing free food while students watched CNN and Fox News—first wings, then Domino’s, then McDonald’s. By the time the president gave his acceptance speech, the students had eaten it all. “Tell me,” I said, “how did you feel as you were watching the results come in?”

Many of my students said they’d felt scared. “If Romney won, I was going to move to Canada,” a student in the front declared. Several of his classmates agreed. “If Romney won,” he added, “this classroom would be empty.”

“I’m so relieved,” someone said. “I get to keep my Pell grant.”

“Who’d you vote for?”

I still hadn’t told them.

***

Before I taught at Xavier, I taught English at the University of Mississippi. My Ole Miss students weren’t that different from my Xavier students. Some were brilliant. Some had trouble with subject-verb agreement. In one class, we watched An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore scared them. “That guy ran for president?” somebody asked. “I used to think climate change was a scam,” another said. “What can we do?” On the last day of class, I gave each student a cloth bag. “It’s a small gift,” I said. “But now you don’t have to waste plastic.” Many of them promised they’d use it.

***

“Students at my last school rioted last night,” I confessed to my Xavier students toward the end of our election discussion. “I’m so ashamed.”

“What did you expect?” a young woman said. “It’s Mississippi.”

I observed that sentiment a lot when I was scanning the Internet, trying to learn everything I could about the incident. Undergraduates burned an Obama/Biden sign in a central area of campus known as the Circle. Some shouted racial slurs. Some threw rocks at cars. Two people were arrested. Between 300 and 400 students came out for the event, though it’s unclear how many were rioters and how many were there to witness the commotion. In the comments section below these articles, no one seemed surprised: “What do you expect from the state with the lowest literacy rate and the fattest population?”

When racism occurs in Mississippi, no one’s surprised. “We’re always getting accused,” my Ole Miss students used to complain.

“Why do you think that is?” I’d ask them.

During my four years at Ole Miss, white frat boys threw beers at a black student who tried to attend their party and students dressed in black face on Halloween. Undergrads and alums agitated to reinstate Colonel Reb, a beady-eyed man reminiscent of a plantation owner, as the school mascot. “It’s about keeping up traditions,” they claimed. And fans rose at each and every football game to chant, “The South will rise again!”

Two days after the riot, someone scratched KKK into the hood of black student’s truck and etched Go Home N—- onto the side. The stereo had been stolen and the radio antenna broken off.

 ***

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “The loss of a white majority has helped drive a truly explosive growth of the radical right.” Hate groups are on the rise throughout the country, and with them, the likelihood of racial violence. Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at the Atlantic, recently observed, “The election of an African American to our highest political office was alleged to demonstrate a triumph of integration.” Instead, Obama’s presidency has “demonstrated integration’s great limitation—that acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black.” The president’s near silence on the topic of race is both the proof and the consequence of this double standard. Even so, commentators have compared Obama’s presidency, and the consequent white backlash, to the end of Reconstruction, an era when hope for racial justice was replaced by the implementation of Jim Crow laws, widespread lynchings, and economic disparity.

 ***

“My mom suggested that I apply for law school at Ole Miss,” a Xavier student tells me. We’re talking about the riots, again. “’Listen to yourself,’ I said to her. ‘Why would I go there?’”

“We’ve had forty-three white presidents,” a young man points out, “and everyone gets angry when we finally elect a black one?”

“I only experienced racism once,” another woman says, “when I was a child. I was in line at the grocery store. I didn’t understand what was happening.”

My class erupts with stories. “The kids at my high school made fun of my skin.”

“There are counties in Kentucky no black person will drive through.”

“Six white girls beat up my cousin, and she was the one who got in trouble for defending herself.”

“A cashier at the grocery store accused me of stealing when I was holding my grandmother’s purse.”

“My father got pulled over for having tinted windows. I know the cop who did it—his son has tinted windows.”

“The park in my town locks up their basketball courts only one day a week—the day that my church has always had our picnic.”

“I’m starting to get emotional.”

“It makes me so angry.”

“We can’t even defend ourselves.”

“Nobody’s born hating anyone. Someone taught those kids to be that way.”

 ***

2012 marks fifty years since James Meredith integrated Ole Miss. In 1962, white students and anti-integrationists rioted in the Circle, the very same space where an Obama poster flared on election night. In order to navigate the rioters at Ole Miss, Meredith was accompanied by 500 U.S. Marshals, the 70th Army Engineer Combat Battalion from Kentucky, the U.S. Army Military Police, the Mississippi Army National Guard, and the members of the U.S. Border Patrol. Two people died in the ensuing violence, and 160 U.S. Marshals were injured. If you take a tour of the campus, the guide will show you the bullet holes in the Lyceum columns, markers of a clash that is supposed to be long over. “This year, we voted for our first black homecoming queen,” your guide will likely say. “Her name is Courtney Pearson. Perhaps, you saw her on TV.”

***

Words come easy when you’re angry. I had no difficulty yelling at President Bush when I was eighteen and felt my vote had been steamrolled. I didn’t want to be arrested, but I decided that if I was, I had nothing to be ashamed of. I’d be on the correct side of history. I’d be exercising my First Amendment rights. These were easy conclusions for me to come to. I was white. I grew up in the suburbs. At that time, no one I knew had ever been to jail. Prison, to me, was a concept. I wanted to be heroic.

“There’s pleasure,” a colleague of mine observed, “in indignation, but not every one chooses to express it.” As a first-time voter, I’d felt a strange joy when Gore lost and I got to declare that I’d been disenfranchised, ignored. For once, my anger felt important. The anti-Obama rioters, no doubt, felt similarly. Indignation clicks on in moments of perceived injustice. Unchecked, it rolls quickly out of control, gaining momentum at the expense of perspective.

***

In response to the riots, students, faculty, and alumni at Ole Miss gathered the following evening in the Circle to “redeem the meaning of ‘Mississippi’ and, through that redemption, to claim the promise of America.” They came together to affirm by candlelight that they were better than their reputation. An anonymous person wrote on We Are All Mississippians, a brand new webpage, “The heart of democracy is embodied in the First Amendment. We support the rights of individuals to be fearful and to express their hatred, but we also know that such expressions demand [us] to affirm our values, of love, of peace, of justice. And we must go to the source of the pain, not run from it. It cannot be healed in darkness and silence.”

 ***

It’s easy to get caught up in the sport of politics—picking sides, scoring debates, cheering on favorite players. But like any game, democracy requires good sportsmanship. Just because you play, doesn’t mean you’ll win. Being blue in a red state, as I am, or red in a blue country, as many Ole Miss students are, is a discourse to be undertaken with dignity. Our country is only as good as our dialogue. 

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I’m starting with this quote because I think it’s useful for drawing out a couple of viewpoints about the role of government overall, but particularly in situations like these. I’m going to go back in time for my first response to this notion, all the way back to Alexander Hamilton before we had a Constitution, when he was arguing vociferously in favor of one. Hamilton was arguing for a stronger national government because the one that put in place by the Articles of Confederation was, to put it mildly a disaster. Too much power remained in the hands of the states, which meant responding to common threats or challenges was nearly impossible. In Federalist #23 he wrote “if we are in earnest about giving the Union energy and duration, we must abandon the vain project of legislating upon the States in their collective capacities; we must extend the laws of the federal government to the individual citizens of America.” He was talking about national defense primarily, but I think the reasoning holds for disasters of this type.

One of the things I have long hated about the conservative argument fomented by Ronald Reagan and his progeny that government is the problem, never the solution, is that it pretends like government is made up of someone other than us. It suggests that citizenship is not related to governance. But that’s nonsense. We get the government we vote for, and the government we demand. If we demand a government that cedes its responsibilities to the states, or worse, puts incompetent people at the helm of agencies like FEMA, then we get results like Michael “Brownie” Brown after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. (More on that guy later.)

Mind you, we have another example of just how a President Romney might respond to a national disaster, even if he says he didn’t quite mean what he said about FEMA last year. He was governor of Massachusetts during a pretty massive flood, and even his few political allies in the state weren’t happy with his response. Maybe he wanted mayors and sheriffs to take more responsibility. It’s not really clear.

In the meantime, what’s the former Governor up to? Well, he’s claiming a campaign event really isn’t a campaign event, while the President is going to the Red Cross and directing the federal response to Sandy, garnering praise from such political allies as Governor Christie of New Jersey. Allies of Governor Romney, that is.

The President is also taking heat from some unexpected and–were the situation not so serious, comically inept–quarters. Former FEMA Chief Michael Brown actually argued the Obama administration reacted to Sandy too quickly. You read that correctly. How do you even respond to that?

The reason humans organize themselves into societies is because we recognize, on some level, that we can do things collectively that we can’t do individually. We cede some of our individual freedom in exchange for the benefits that come from living in groups–things as basic as dependable sources of clean water and electricity are only possible with collective effort. Don’t believe me? Go to any part of the world with an ineffective central government, and you’ll see instability at all levels. Politics is the method we use to argue over and decide how much of that individual freedom we’re willing to cede, and what we demand in return for it.

And the response to this and previous natural disasters shows a pretty clear choice. There’s a group that is willing to let you fend for yourself in the face of the overwhelming power of a storm such as Hurricane Sandy, and there’s a group that feels a duty to try to protect you during the storm and help you recover afterward. This isn’t necessarily a party thing either. Governor Christie of New Jersey is a Republican, a conservative, a spokesman for Governor Romney, but he’s been killing it in his response to this storm. He obviously believes, at some level, that it’s government’s duty to take care of its citizens.

Next week, we’ll finish the latest argument over what sort of government we want, and we’ll start on the next one almost immediately. The response to this storm will extend beyond that, and will no doubt be fodder for the next argument, along with whatever else pops up going forward. And we’ll rehash a lot of these same fights–how much help do we want? how much help do we want to give? who deserves it?–but remember that you’re voting (or not) for something that you are a part of. The government is not the enemy. It is us.

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I saw the headline on Talking Points Memo and had to read it twice to believe it.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

The response has been swift. President Obama held an impromptu press conference during which he said “Rape is rape, and the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me.”

Mother Jones points out that not only did Akins get the science wrong, he’s far from the only member of the Republican party to do so. Iowa Representative Steve King, better known for immigrant and Muslim-bashing than for his stance on abortion, said he’d never heard of a girl getting pregnant from statutory rape or incest. His office later clarified his statement to say that King knew no one personally who’d been in that situation.

The Republican Presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, released a statement criticizing Akin’s comment, but it should be noted that Romney’s statement is in contradiction to his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan’s position on abortion. In fact, Akins, Ryan and King were all co-sponsors of a bill introduced earlier this year that would have limited the rape exception for Medicaid recipients to victims of “forcible rape.”

Akins is also receiving support from conservative groups. Bryan Fischer of the AmericanFamily Association doubled down on Akins’ claim, and former child star (and banana creationist) Kirk Cameron also backed Akins’ statement. And former Arkansas Governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee also defended Akins, and offered Akins time on his radio show to announce that he was staying in the race for the Senate.

Amanda Marcotte, writing for Slate, points out that rape exceptions don’t actually work, unless the goal is to actually stop rape victims from getting abortions and still have political cover for it.

Also, it’s not like Akins (or King, or Ryan) is out of the mainstream of Republican thought when it comes to abortion. The Republican party is adopting its official platform right now and includes “support for a ‘human life amendment’ to the Constitution that would outlaw abortion without making explicit exemptions for rape or incest.’” This language is very similar to the platforms that have been adopted by Republicans in every presidential election year since 2000.

It should also be noted that such an amendment would potentially make many forms of birth control, as well as fertility treatments like IVF, illegal.

Finally, I found this image on the website Balloon Juice yesterday. Akins is a member of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

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