[Credit for this photo goes to Jim Oliver Photography. See his lovely website at: http://www.jimoliverphotography.com/]
What Makes a Political Poet?
what did the red rooster say to the crow? i dont know. and neither do they. but that doesnt stop them from babbling, that doesnt stop them from traveling, down the same dead road again.
-- Roopa Singh, Political Poet, Lawyer, and Hip Hop Artist
In the aforementioned poetic narrative, the political poet, Roopa Singh, could have been describing almost any of the political machinations that masquerade as democratic elections in the Republic, for which so many citizens of the United States of America have failed to stand. Certainly, they vividly portray the two major, establishment candidates in the Texas Republican Gubernatorial Primary in 2010 (Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchinson).
In fact, Singh’s words could serve as the political mantra for the gubernatorial campaign of upstart, grassroots candidate, Debra Medina as she surges in the polls in her seemingly unlikely quest to come out of political obscurity and to represent the rank and file citizens of Texas. Wresting the Republican nomination from the grasp of the longest serving governor in Texas history, now, seems no longer an impossibility. Is any human endeavor ever impossible? Or, does it only appear that way because people do not have the heart or the will to make their dreams a reality?
The role of the poet in society is not simply to write or speak musical or flowery words. The poet need not even write with rhyme or meter. The form of the words represent only the technical characteristics of poetic speech. They don’t even have to be phrased using “the King’s English” in proper grammatical form, nor must they demonstrate good spelling and punctuation. A poet need not even write or speak in a form recognizable as poetry as such. The poet may speak in narrative prose with or without metrical rhythm. As Jeffrey Petty has pointed out, in a verse entitled, “What is a Poet,” a poet uses words, embellishing them
…to tell a story
of love, hate, beauty or hard won glory.
One who can make us laugh or cry
imagine, enjoy or give a soft sigh….
In fact, Petty writes,
A poet can be most anything
their pen allows them to be
as long as the words which they bring
enable us each to see.....[Final ellipsis in original]
In other words, the poet’s role is to enable us to see what we have ignored or have failed to see or what we are just not prepared to see because of the way in which our individual brains are wired and how they function.
Hank Lazer, Associate Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Alabama , writes reflecting on the 25th anniversary of a symposium he organized in 1983, which included lectures by both poets and critics, and which he edited in a volume published in 1987 entitled, What is a Poet [which is still in print]
Each poet presented a lecture and a reading; each critic presented a lecture; all participants took part in the concluding panel discussion. Certain questions came up again and again – in the lectures, in conversations throughout the symposium, and in the panel discussion: what is a poet? what is a critic?
One participant, Louis Simpson, hit the proverbial nail on the head, in my opinion, when he stated:
I think that this distinction between poets and critics as it’s going around here is not good. I’ve never met a poet who was not a critic. It is impossible to be a poet without being a critic as you write. And most of the good critics have much of the poetic feeling in them.
In an earlier post on this blog, entitled
We Need “Political Artists” in Government, Not “Political Hacks”
I quoted the late, famed, symphonic conductor, Leonard Bernstein, who once said:
"It is the artists of the world….who will ultimately save us; [those] who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams” [Emphasis Added].
Sovereignty or Secession?
Debra Medina has been criticized even uncritically attacked by those who have misread her intent in running for Governor of Texas. These adversaries harken back to a speech, which she gave early in her campaign at the Texas Sovereignty or Secession Rally on August 29, 2009. They miss the point of her speech, playing up her association with the talk of secession that has been occurring, not only in Texas, but all over the country. What they fail to recognize is that her passion and her criticism of the status quo, which she clearly shares with poets, as described above, is not intent on “deconstructing” society, in particular Texas or U.S. society, as one supportive critic has recently expressed.
I responded to the aforementioned critic, questioning his use of the term “arch-conservative” to characterize Debra Medina.
Nice post. However, I think that the term “arch-conservative” does her an injustice. To some, it might suggest ultra-right wing neoconservatism, which is not Debra Medina by a long shot. Is she conservative? Yes. But, hers is a kind of constitutional, libertarian conservatism that is far more independent than that expressed by the typical run-of-the-mill Republican who claims to be a conservative.
The author replied:
Alan, thanks for dropping by. Your blog suggests you are a Medina supporter and a rather passionate one at that.
As for the arch-conservative description, I leaned heavily on the understanding that the prefix is synonymous with “extreme.”
Engaging in talk of state secession from the United States, combined with her desire to completely dismantle the property tax system–a system that has been the key to funding government services and programs at state and county levels, not to mention the state’s public education–these positions I consider to be extreme and radical social deconstructions. So I would agree with you that she’s not a traditional conservative, nor is she a Neocon, whose expansion of government was primarily focused on privatizing wealth and socializing debt.
In the August 2009 speech, it is clear that Medina has taken up the challenge to “articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams,” as Bernstein described. She is clearly not intent on “deconstructing” society as the supportive critic worries, but rather in “reconstructing” social and political edifices that have fallen into disrepair out of apathy and gross neglect. Her effort during this speech and her efforts throughout the campaign have been to try to waken people from their collective stupor, induced by institutions like the Super Bowl, which is surely capturing more attention of the American public today, as I write, than these poor words can add or detract.
It does not take much impetus to cause Americans to spring into passionate action and to line up on their respective sides of the virtual gridiron on Super Bowl Sunday. But, such passionate reactions are mobilized by mass advertising and mass indoctrination into the competitive, “wanna-be,” sports mythology and culture that dominates the consciousness of America as a whole. The poet leader is the voice crying in this consciousness-bereft wilderness, trying to instill some small inkling of a reality that transcends big screen TVs, Doritos, and beer.
Extremism in the Defense of Liberty?
In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater delivered a stirring reaffirmation of the defense of freedom in accepting the nomination of the Republican Party for President of the United States. This address came in the national turmoil in the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the year before. Goldwater said:
The good Lord raised this mighty Republic to be a home for the brave and to flourish as the land of the free—not to stagnate in the swampland of collectivism, not to cringe before the bullying of communism.
Now, my fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false prophets. We must, and we shall, return to proven ways—not because they are old, but because they are true. We must, and we shall, set the tides running again in the cause of freedom. And this party, with its every action, every word, every breath, and every heartbeat, has but a single resolve, and that is freedom—freedom made orderly for this Nation by our constitutional government; freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature's God; freedom balanced so that order lacking liberty will not become the slavery of the prison shell [cell]; balanced so that liberty lacking order will not become the license of the mob and of the jungle.
Now, we Americans understand freedom. We have earned it; we have lived for it, and we have died for it. This Nation and its people are freedom's model in a searching world. We can be freedom's missionaries in a doubting world. But, ladies and gentlemen, first we must renew freedom's mission in our own hearts and in our own homes….
Now, those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. They—and let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions, ladies and gentlemen, of equality. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which—which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people. And, so help us God, that is exactly what a Republican President will do with the help of a Republican Congress….
Now I know this freedom is not the fruit of every soil. I know that our own freedom was achieved through centuries, by unremitting efforts of brave and wise men. And, I know that the road to freedom is a long and a challenging road. And I know also that some men may walk away from it, that some men resist challenge, accepting the false security of governmental paternalism [Emphasis added]….
And, then, Goldwater brings his speech to a dramatic climax with his classic and signature sound byte, which continues to resound down through the decades.
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
And, let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Some would say that extremism is always a vice, that the end does not justify the means. In other words, to act in an extremist manner is to behave irresponsibly and potentially destructively. With this in mind, let’s now carefully examine Debra Medina’s words in the “Sovereignty and Secession Rally” video, not simply with a kind of football, “we versus them” mentality, not with a high school English teacher’s critical perception, not with the conventional wisdom of the two factions of the Big Government Party (BGP), but with an appreciation of her love of liberty, her respect for the Constitution in protecting that freedom, and her single-minded willingness to put herself in front of the troops who are willing to get up off their duffs and to say, “No more” to those who would continue to disregard and shred the Constitution, as was so ignobly etched in our consciousness by the phrase, “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper.”
When she quotes Ben Franklin’s homage to the symbol of the coiled serpent on the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag of the early revolutionaries, she is not intent on disrespecting or devaluing the United States of America, as some have claimed, but clearly intent on emphasizing the basic notion of a voluntary union of the States for their common benefit, and the fact that such voluntary union is indelibly inscribed in, and reinforced by, the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution.
Her images from Franklin’s description of the unseen weapons of the snake and metaphorical connections to her campaign are graphic with implicit violence, and may be taken by some as evidence of extreme or radical views, even perhaps demagoguery, but they are clearly, in my view, reflections of the natural tendency of living organisms to protect themselves when they see danger on the horizon, or in this case, when they see their fellow Americans and Texans behaving like the frog in the pot, the water of which is being slowly increased in temperature to forestall it’s jumping out until it is finally too exhausted to muster the energy to avoid destruction.
Human beings are not frogs, although they have fallen into acting like them in our complex, modern society and, I am not talking just about TCU fans. It’s the whole Southwest Conference, for Pete’s sake! No, it’s the freaking whole nation who have become like listeners to “The Buster Brown TV Show with Smilin' Ed McConnell and his Buster Brown Gang,” a program, which was on radio and TV up until about the mid-50s.
There was a character on this popular show, which pitched “Buster Brown” shoes, called “Mr. Froggy the Magic Gremlin.” Mr. Froggy lived in a clock. In the Buster Brown advertising, there was a kid dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy,
a character in the 1886 novel of the same name that was made into a movie in 1936. He would routinely say,
I'm Buster Brown, I live in a shoe. That's my dog, Tige. He lives there too!
The catchphrase, of course, referred to the company label inside its kids’ shoes.
Smilin’ Ed would predictably say at a point of suspense,
“Plunk your magic twanger, Frog-gy!”
And, after this ominous foreboding, one would hear a twanging sound that signaled something that was to happen next.
One writer, reminiscing about the shoe recalled that there was “something about the character that bothered me, and I can recall having some ‘weird’ dreams because of this.” Maybe his remembered discomfort reflects his childish preoccupation with unfamiliar, and thus scary things, and it is this residual, archaic, tendency to avoid which makes us, as modern citizens, uncomfortable, and which prevails now as people are willing to give up their freedom in order to protect their freedom from assault by individuals who would terrorize them. Give up freedom to protect freedom? Is not the illogic evident. Once we acquiesce to efforts to limit freedom, we are truly becoming like frogs in the pot. The powers that be can turn up the heat of tyranny so gradually that we never even notice that we are being slowly and unknowingly enticed to participate in our own destruction.
But, Debra Medina, like Congressman Ron Paul, before her in his 2008 campaign for the Presidency has come forward to say “No” to the proposition of relinquishing freedom under the guise of providing for our welfare. It does not matter whether it is the false boogie man of “global terrorism” or the attempts of governments (federal, state, and local) to steal more and more power and control over our lives with their ever-expanding bureaucratic and corrupt extraction of private property from citizens, be it in income or property taxes or unconstitutional and absurd, federal regulations such as requiring all public swimming pools, even in private condominium complexes to install “child-proof” drains.
In the previously mentioned video, one hears Debra saying (again early in her campaign, her words having been subsequently fined-tuned to clarify her intent)
Hear us Washington. Hear us Austin, Texas. We will not stand for tyranny in our state, and we will not stand for tyranny in our country….We will not stand for the nationalization of our business. We will not stand for fascism in our country. We are here today to talk about sovereignty or secession. I am here today to encourage the Texas legislature and the governor of the State of Texas to defend the sovereignty of this great state...to defend in a fierce and vigilant way in which they have never defended before, and I am here today to remind them that our Founders gave us the ability to do that.
Then, came the words that have given her critics the ammunition which they have tried to use to shoot down her vision and leadership in seeking a positive reconstruction of a political infrastructure that is bleeding American citizens into exhaustion, like patients of old who were bled by their trusted physicians with the belief that the doctors were acting in their best interests. In addressing those who would impulsively and irresponsibly encourage secession, Debra speaks of the possibility of secession as a heroic last resort and is mindful that this raises the possibility of dire consequences, including bloodshed, which thoughtful, committed citizens are willing to countenance or endure in order to preserve what they truly value and hold dear.
We are aware that stepping off into secession may in fact be a bloody war….
She is speaking graphically and powerfully to the potential hotheads, in a way that holds their attention. Then, she uses the metaphor of a quotation from Thomas Jefferson, popular in the Liberty Movement, to further arrest and hold the attention of those who have become infected with idealistic heroism and self sacrifice.
We understand that the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots. These are serious days.
Then she segues, rather subtly away from the secession imagery and toward advocacy of her unconventional, but certainly not extremist approach, for dealing with the excesses of government.
I want to remind us, though, Jefferson made an eloquent argument for the use of nullification and interposition. We’ve not even tried those weapons in our arsenal. We’ve not even begun to use them [Emphasis added].
Then, she quotes Jefferson in a different context, which represents an ingenious shunting of Jeffersonian, patriotic energy onto another, constructive track.
Jefferson said that, if those who administer the general government, be permitted to transgress the limits fixed by out compact as a union by a total disregard, could we have any more total disregard for this compact as we have today, the power therein contained that the states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent states have the unquestionable right—it’s our right to judge when you are transgressing on us, it’s our right—and we have the right to nullify by those sovereignties all unauthorized acts done under the color of the Constitution. That is our rightful remedy.
We will nullify Cap and Trade. We will nullify national healthcare. We will nullify Real ID. And, we will damn sure nullify you (sic) trying to take our guns.
Not Texas, not Austin, Texas nor Washington D.C., will transgress on our property. We will not—we will no longer stand in Texas for leasing back [that], which we have worked hard to possess, from our government. We will eliminate property tax in Texas. We will own our property and we will own our guns and Texans will be free.
And, when Texas stands, and when Texas waves that “Don’t Tread on Me” [flag], and Texas says, “Come and take it,” when we stand for freedom in Texas, the United States of America will begin again to look like a republic, the great Republic that we are.
It is up to us. It is up to you. Power corrupts and money corrupts, and there was corruption in Washington, D.C. and there was corruption in Austin, Texas, and we will stand for it no more.
Heart of an Extremist or Political Poet?
The words which Debra Medina spoke in the Summer of 2009 are manifestly not the words, nor do they reflect the heart, of a secessionist, of an extremist rabble-rouser, if you will. They are words reflecting the heart of a political poet, even if she lacks all of the technical skills of the poet’s craft.
In my previously referenced blog entry, I wrote:
The artist [and I showed elsewhere in the post that this designation included poets, or word artists], is one who perceives what the ordinary person fails to perceive, who articulates what the common person fails to articulate. Thus, the artist is a leader in the sense of challenging us to look for new understanding in previously unexamined areas and with previously unrecognized awareness.
Debra Medina is challenging all of us “to look for new understanding in previously unexamined areas and with previously unrecognized awareness. Her challenges do not make her an “arch-conservative.” Such a term only is sensible in the context of the mentality of all of the “Archies” and “Veronicas” and “Jugheads,” who reside in a comic strip parody of American reality, where candidates, carefully groomed and selected by the elite powers-that-be, to be the standard bearers for the two wings of the Big Government Party (BGP), carry out political machinations that masquerade as representative democracy in the presumed Republic which was once truly the United States of America.
For updated information regarding Debra Medina’s position on nullification and interposition and the secession issue, as well as many other important issues, go to the Medina For Texas site.
On February 6, 2010, at a Tea Party Rally in Cleburne, Texas, Debra Medina reiterated her commitment to a peaceful revolution when she said that "this is a time, unlike any other time in our history, where we're gonna stand up and accomplish a revolution without sheddin' a drop of blood. We're gonna restore those principles and those ideas that our Founders fought for....This is not a state of "we can't" but a state of "we can and we will," by golly. We can and we will."
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