With the Retardican Party

The Dissociated Press sent me to test the waters at the rally last night for President Koom-Posh, former child-star of the popular Mr. Brain TV show. Allow me to share a few impressions from the event, held at a local airfield.

Hovercraft were circling, dropping confetti and Anti-Responsibility, or Antiree, propaganda thickly everywhere. The concerns of the Antiree movement are so small that they fit on tiny, nearly dust-sized pieces of paper. Numerous older folk who had been brought to the rally by Retardican organizers were choking and reeling over, hacking and feebly begging for handkerchiefs. One sufferer told me that the shuttlebus driver had taken away his mask, because of the cameras. Coverage needed to show Retardican unity, the driver said.

I was wearing my mask, of course. It was my own news coverage, I suppose. I feared it would do me little good, though, given the shouting and screaming around me from those who seemed able to breathe and exhale clouds of Antiree propaganda without distress. When President Koom-Posh appeared, he arrived surrounded by the device Retardican leaders have been using lately. It seems perfectly transparent and efficacious, at least when used among fellow Retardicans. These "Bubbles of Delusion," produced by Devotion Under Infidelity, or DUI, an agency run by the President's uncle's wealthiest nephew, have become synonymous with the President's claim to have won the last election, and to have already won the next one.

A great hoorah following Koom-Posh's revelation that an adulatory mirror had told him he looked extremely handsome that morning. Then he excoriated his opponents for their socialism. "They say I have no plan for my second term but I have one," he said, inserting his trademark screech of understatement. "I will end socialism. I have already knocked over environmental barriers to business and industry because the national parks and wilderness areas, even our very land and water and air, are infected with public ownership! Now I will lay low not only Social Security — you see how cleverly they slipped 'Social' into its name? — but also the U.S. military, which is socialistically owned by the state; the VA hospitals, which are socialized medicine; the police, a socialized security force that must become even more anti-social; and the highways, those socialized routes for travel that insidiously have spread everywhere! Who needs them when I can fly here to see you in Air Force One, which is socialized air transport for my use only and which I personally will privatize!"

During the roar of approval I turned to a nearby woman with a small hat-size and enormous chest who was breathing rapidly.

"I thought last time," I said, "that he accused the opposition of wanting to eliminate the police."

"This isn't eliminating! He will make them all private Homely Securitoids!"

"Make them — what?"

"You aren't a believer, are you?"

"Oh, I suspect Koom-Posh has dug himself a deep enough hole."

"Just you wait! He'll dig himself deeper!"

On stage, Koom-Posh accused the Media of counting how many people were being hospitalized with breathing problems, not to mention Covid, after his rallies. "The Media are creating the situation and need to stop the counting!"

I turned to my companion again.

"He may get his wish. The Media will stop counting votes for him."

"That won't matter!"

"It won't?"

"No! He is above that!"

"He is?"

"Yes! Counting applies to everyone else! But he doesn't count!"

"President Koom-Posh — "

"President Koom-Posh doesn't have to count! So he doesn't count! He doesn't count!"

So loudly vociferous was she that others around her took it up. Soon the area was roaring, as well as wheezing, the chant of President Koom-Posh's not counting.

"Am I not counting on you?" came the responding roar from the stage.

"We don't count! We don't count!" roared back the crowd.

The time had come to leave, I thought. My ears were ringing with emanations from Koom-over's Bubble of Delusion and the none-too-tuneful ululations and chantings thickly swirling about me. The police at the edge, however, were letting no one leave early, unless on a gurney. Someone bumped me from behind. Turning to find a policeman there, I felt my mask being ripped away. A baton propelled me headfirst back into the crowd. I gasped, took in a dusty lungful, and passed out.

The next morning — apparently, since the sky was bright with sunshine — I woke groggily to a piercing headache. I held my hands before my eyes, and saw they were chalk-white.

I had frozen to death!

My hands shook so violently with fear at this insane thought that the thick Antiree dusting fell away. The stuff had nearly persuaded me. I stood up, coughing, and looked around at the field covered with corpses — or whatever they were, abandoned on the runway tarmac and surrounding grass. They looked like those ash-covered bodies at Pompeii.

I went to the cordon at the field's edge, still manned by police.

"Why is this fence here?" I said.

"To keep the Media from counting you all in there," said a policewoman.

"But I'm not one of them. I'm not dead."

She squinted at me. I half expected her to ask about my being a believer or not. Then she opened the gate.

"I guess you don't count," she said.

I believe she meant it as a compliment.

The Winter King

The Winter King

You look out on a world now crusted thick
with ice and snow, now that the Winter King
sits on the eastern throne and everything
stops —— caught short, clutched in cold. A con-man's trick

klept him the scepter; social subterfuge
dispatched a knight or two who might have ruled
more justly. Blathering his rude, unschooled
prejudgements —— promising a resort refuge

for the gently taxed well-heeled, he kills
a lady bearing torch in flowing gown ——
perhaps does else, once knife has kissed her down ——
and smiles. To win a test of wills with ills!
Pleased that an ursine purse pulled down this crown
his porcine party wallows in his swills.

(Note that I posted here this poem as "You Look Out on a World," in 2017, thinking it a fair enough draft. I felt the desire, though, to finish it. This month I have done so. Cheers. . . )

President Koom-Posh

I have written several blog entries this year that I have held off posting for various reasons, good or otherwise. Yet now I have sent in a blog entry to Aqueduct (aqueductpress.blogspot.com) — another "Readings" installment that should appear sometime this season. That essay had room for a few but not all thoughts that were coming to mind.

So here I follow a few unvoiced strands.

Aqueduct's L. Timmel Duchamp has told me that she is "becoming an apostle of slow thinking." My sporadic blogging arises from a similar inclination, which has realized itself in my policy to post here only what I have drafted first in handwriting, usually in pencil. I still do some writing on typewriter and computer keyboard. Yet blog entries I want to redraft minimally, if possible.

My typing speed results, too often, in that which haste produces: words parading as Thought. While I acknowledge the demands of expediency, I believe a writer must nurture the writing process at every turn. That means nurturing thought, as opposed to hastening words. Writing as a process yields thought. Hastened words only reflect thoughts; and since they must reflect expedience, as well, they tend to reflect those thoughts incompletely or inaccurately.

This has become a pressing issue, to my mind, with the rise to power by Koom-Posh. Bulwer Lytton coined this term for "government of the many, or the ascendancy of the most ignorant or hollow."

Andrew Jackson I suspect could have been called President Koom-Posh, had the term then existed. However quick and canny a man he was, his making cronyism into a political institution points to hollowness. Expediency, prior to his becoming president, seems to have ruled him; and, afterwards, its demands, rather than those of the presidency, continued to rule.

The other day I came across comments stating that the presidency requires "exclusive fealty" to the constitution. "Fealty" as a word has links to fidelity; and this suggests that in thinking about a person who lacks such fealty, one might use "infidelity" as an attribute, or "infidel," as a label. The current president-elect Comb-Over, or Koom-Over, or Posh-Over, has indicated he wishes to continue his businesses while part-time president; and business cronies will dominate his administration. His fealty lies with another lord than the Constitution. Perhaps we might call him His Expediency.

Our eclectic, mannerist Age of the Masses has its deepest shallow roots in the Modern century, roughly the 1860s to 1950s. Van Wyck Brooks, in writing about the later 1800s, noted alterations to the American Fabric then being made — such as the conscious discarding of the traditional writings that had offered bedrock, on which her founders could build the United States.

I find what Brooks said about the Classics telling. They "kept alive great patterns of behavior ... The close association of intimate studies had made the patterns real, and the patterns had made great writers as they made great statesmen. They appealed to the instinct of emulation, an instinct that in later days followed the patterns set by industrial leaders, by bankers and by millionaires whose only idea was the will to power and who ruled by the blind force of money."