By Beauty Damned

Could Not be Better Said

In the comments of an earlier thread, my dad posted a great comment plus this dynamite poem by Carl Sandburg. I felt his comments and the Sandburg poem deserved a place of their own on this blog.

Bush's inauguration is a military display disguised as security, and an affront to ordinary people of extraordinary magnitude. This insult comes complete with sharpshooters patrolling above the crowds, and security squads evicting people from their own homes and offices on the flimsy excuse that they overlook the parade route! My papa liked to read poetry aloud, and often did so on visiting Sundays when he came to see me out at the Catholic military school where I was interned for three years. He particularly liked this poem by Carl Sandburg, and could read it with real style. Please do read it aloud to someone and revel in the feeling it inspires. Just check out these rhymes:

"Two kaisers backed by ten million bayonets
Had their crowns in the gutter, their palaces mobbed,
In fire, chaos, shadow,
In hurricanes beyond foretelling..."

The gusto my father put into reading this poem epitomized the spirit that was in him, of loving people, of wanting them to prosper and do well, and of knowing that they are just not smart enough. I loved the poem with very little depth of understanding of the concepts involved, and with much fascination with the striding rhythm, the shocking images shot in lightning flashes, the rhythm as of many people marching together. This poem is worth reading over and over, so I commend it to you with much love as an antidote to the seasickness that afflicts one when witnessing something as luridly self-indulgent as this horrific inauguration folly. Mark my words -- the end is nigh.

The People Speak by Carl Sandburg

The people, yes, the people,
Until the people are taken care of one way or another,
Until the people are solved somehow for the day and hour,
Until then one hears " Yes but the people what about the people? "
Sometimes as though the people is a child to be pleased or fed
Or again a hoodlum you have to be tough with
And seldom as though the people is a caldron and a reservoir
Of the human reserves that shape history. . . .

Fire, chaos, shadows,
Events trickling from a thin line of flame
On into cries and combustions never expected.
The people have the element of surprise. . . .

" The czar has eight million men with guns and bayonets
Nothing can happen to the czar.
The czar is the voice of God and shall live forever.
Turn and look at the forest of steel and cannon
Where the czar is guarded by eight million soldiers.
Nothing can happen to the czar."

They said that for years and in the summer of 1914,
As a portent and an assurance they said with owl faces:
" Nothing can happen to the czar,"
Yet the czar and his bodyguard of eight million vanished
And the czar stood in a cellar before a little firing squad
And the command of fire was given
And the czar stepped into regions of mist and ice
The czar traveled into an ethereal uncharted siberia
While two kaisers also vanished from thrones
Ancient and established in blood and iron
Two kaisers backed by ten million bayonets
Had their crowns in a gutter, their palaces mobbed.
In fire, chaos, shadows,
In hurricanes beyond foretelling of probabilities
In the shove and whirl of unforeseen combustions
The people, yes, the people,
Move eternally in the elements of surprise,
Changing from hammer to bayonet and back to hammer,
The hallelujah chorus forever shifting its star soloists.

The people learn, unlearn, learn,
a builder, a wrecker, a builder again,
a juggler of shifting puppets.
In so few eyeblinks
In transition lightning streaks,
the people project midgets into giants,
the people shrink titans into dwarfs

Faiths blow on the winds
and become shibboleths
and deep growths
with men ready to die
for a living word on the tongue,
for a light alive in the bones,
for dreams fluttering in the wrists. ...

Sleep is a suspension midway
and a conundrum of shadows
lost in meadows of the moon.
The people sleep.

Ai! ai! the people sleep.
Yet the sleepers toss in sleep
and an end comes of sleep
and the sleepers wake.
Ai! ai! the sleepers wake! . . .

The storm of propaganda blows always.
In every air of today the germs float and hover.
The people have the say-so.
Let the argument go on.
Let the people listen.

Tomorrow the people say Yes or No by one question:
" What else can be done? "
In the drive of faiths on the wind today the people know:
" We have come this far and we are going farther yet" ...

The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas. ...

The people is a tragic and comic two-face:
hero and hoodlum: phantom and gorilla twist-
ing to moan with a gargoyle mouth: " They
buy me and sell me. ..it's a game. ..
sometime I'll break loose. .,"

Now the steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother the earth over may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil -the people, yes
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
There are women beyond purchase.
The fire born are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise.
You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher .
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people march:
" Where to? what next?
Where to? what next?"

He went on in a subseqent post to say:

Constitutional government is founded upon the complete elimination of all distinctions between the nobility and the rest of us. The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, provides:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present Emolument, Office, or Title, or any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Now excuse me, but there can be only one reason for someone to be given an incredible ass-kissing ego-boost of this type, in the course of which he will receive millions of dollars in donations from people who seek to curry favor with him, and advantage for their friends and relations, while taxpayers foot the bill. As the article from the NYT explains, the poor, overtaxed, abused citizens of Washington D.C. will have to fund over $17 Million dollars of this latter-day Napoleonic orgy of self-adulation. There is only one reason to go overboard like this -- because Bush is crowning himself King. Read it and weep, ladies and gentlemen. Democracy is dead, and there isn't even a democrat left to identify the corpse.

But after you read the news, you should read the old. Carl Sandburg's poem "The People Speak" is a reminder that even when "the czar has eight million men with guns and bayonets," still, the people can change the course of history, sending the czar and his family to their own private Siberia, turning the palaces of the ruling class into the random galleries of chaos. The poem is quoted in full above. Read it out loud to a friend, to a coffeehouse, to a crowd, to a mob, if you can find one!

Posted by: Charles Carreon at January 15, 2005 06:38 PM