Richard Hoffman

I wrote a poem that I was afraid to publish. Not because I would be persecuted for it, the fate of so many other poets throughout the world, but for other reasons I’ll try to spell out here, reasons that open onto questions of hope and despair, compromise and powerlessness. Here’s the poem:

From time to time, and over several years, I would take the poem from a folder and consider sending it to a magazine. I’m a sucker for the villanelle as a poetic form, and I felt I had pulled it off here, and the poem’s view of our situation as citizens continued to feel accurate. My worry was that the poem would be interpreted as saying that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, doesn’t change anything, and even knowing how few people were likely to read the poem, I didn’t want to be responsible for such categorical cynicism keeping a reader from casting a ballot.

Because when it comes to domestic social policy, it does matter who is elected. Electoral politics, driven by dissent and organizing, has expanded civil rights for many, rights that must be safeguarded by voting. My trouble has to do with America’s role as an empire and the “sweat and blood” we’ve paid to uphold that. Finally, I sent the poem to an editor for an anthology titled We Are Antifa, and it was published there. I figured it would live there quietly among like-minded people and be understood.

Before I go any further, I’d better first say that I believe in the democratic process. I just don’t believe in our democratic process, which is not democratic and is less a process than a popular entertainment, a process that insists we watch “the news” as a civic duty, that we keep track of an ongoing narrative of who said what and who is ahead in the polls and in raising money.

In between segments (no longer than three minutes per, and usually devoted to a single subject) whether on Fox, CNN, or MSNBC, we’re urged to take various drugs by commercials that portray smiling people in a peaceful world while a rapid voice-over lists side effects that can include shortness of breathing, headache, joint pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and death. And we are warned, doubtless at the insistence of the pharmaceutical company’s insurer, not to take the medication if we are allergic to the medication.

The thought has occurred to me that the pharmaceutical companies “own” the cable news companies by virtue of their nearly wall-to-wall sponsorship. They are not so much selling their products as keeping the news organization cooperative. The question I have is whether this undermining of journalism is insurance against bad press should something go wrong, or if it is payment for silence about something that already has.

This hollowing out of original purposes, this introduction of ulteriority, pervades nearly everything. The expressed purpose of an enterprise: a university, a hospital, a church (to pick three tax exempt examples) becomes compromised to the point where it becomes a storefront for the profit-seeking entity that funds it. And the most tragic loss of all, even more than the looting of real value in exchange for mere banknotes, is the erosion of trust. How can one be a citizen in a country of excavated institutions, inauthenticity, empty promises, and overall insincerity?

I began watching cable news during the pandemic, when it seemed necessary to keep up with the latest information. I watched the President suggest injecting disinfectant to cure Covid-19 or finding some way to shine ultraviolet light inside the body. He seemed terribly afraid of the uncertainty his science advisors were being honest about, telling us what they knew and did not yet know, what measures we might take to protect ourselves. These days I watch as if it is my civic duty. Or that’s what I tell myself. I recognize it as the lie an addict tells himself as he tries again and again to just quit.

Ask your doctor if capitalism is right for you.

We’re at a stalemate. Nobody’s changing anybody’s mind. Changing your mind requires thinking, taking your time, deliberating, while the age seems still to demand “an image / Of its accelerated grimace”: What does your gut say? Well, what my gut says is considered rude and is often accompanied by an unpleasant aroma. Thinking lets me respond, not just, uh, vent.

I watched the recent Republican convention in Milwaukee. The delegates waved their little flags and signs and behaved with all the gravitas of Cheeseheads at a Packers’ game. Spare me the bunting and the confetti and the thoroughly market-researched, in-state-focus-group-approved theme music. The entirety of this “democratic process” is orchestrated, made-for-TV, and so tightly circumscribed as to be wholly divorced from reality. The whole of the election season—which begins earlier and earlier like Christmas decorations in a department store—is a pageant we are invited to escape into. What we are escaping from, however, is another story; it’s called empire. It comes with screams and bloodshed, roaring death machines across the sky, and an intricate webwork of lies perfected through centuries of history. My vote for President of the United States seems to have about as much bearing on that reality as my vote for the local alderman.

Skewed, distorted, impoverished, corrupted by militarism and an international arms trade that turns blood into wealth and has found remarkably complicated and obfuscating ways to wash out the stains, what passes for political discourse in America is mostly spectacle, and like just about everything else, an occasion for making money.

Democracy relies on discourse, on conversation. When there is peace. We are not at peace: blood is being shed—across the world and in our own communities. The lives of my loved ones are made ever more precarious, my grandchildren targets for hatred. There are already shelves and shelves of books across the disciplines—history, literature, sociology, psychology—that seek to explain the dynamics of oppression, of hierarchies, of patriarchy. (Men scoff if you use the word patriarchy to describe our society but if you call one of those same men a patriarch he’ll puff out his chest, square up his shoulders, jut out his chin. [I once called out a guy for being a misogynist and he said, “Yeah? Well you’re a PUSSY!”])

I wrote an earlier version of the paragraph above on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, a holiday that ought to be a holy day celebrating a martyr to the cause of human dignity. For weeks in advance my inbox was full of advertisements for “MLK Day” sales. American consumer capitalism has the digestive system of a goat; it will eat anything and leave it behind, turned to shit, wherever it goes, but its very favorite food is meaning, especially shared meanings that have grown from the history and experience of its people.

Ask your doctor if capitalism is right for you.

Behind everything there remains a terrible tug, a feeling that the world is being trampled on by selfish bullies. Our government, with our money, and supported by our ignorance, is changing the face and the future of the planet, tilting its flat earth in favor of interests whose only appetite is for power and control. If the future,—the near future, just as it is about to become the present—appears to be tyranny, repression, poverty, and war, then a terrible feeling of powerlessness nests in the ribcage of every single one of us. And denial makes sense. At least it gives people a little room to live their lives, their domestic, familiar, sensual, daily lives: BBQ and ball games, dates, meals, graduations, weddings, births, funerals, divorces. Who doesn’t feel this counter tug, the wish to relax back into private, personal, local concerns—the rest of the world on the other side of the glass—a comfy terrarium?

We have become, mostly, one another’s customers! Paypal, GoFundMe, Apple Pay, Venmo, Cash App, Google Pay, Zelle, Payoneer, amplify entrepreneurship to the degree that it eclipses other kinds of exchanges. I can’t help but feel the tragic squandering of opportunities for communion, the ache for something more than this lonely use of one another. In addition to the deep regional, racial, class, and political differences we all must negotiate, this shift seems to me a significant force contributing to our estrangement from one another. I hope that it is still possible to resist such a mercantile way of being together. It seems to me that looking for and seeing only advantage—a sale or a bargain—a deal!—makes actually trying to know someone else beside the point. It makes sacrifice foolish, friendship a tool. It even makes love a liability. It occupies our affections with receipts and invoices, working out what we owe and what we’ve paid. Is generosity generosity when it expects, requires, repayment? Is gratitude gratitude when it is a debt? (Venmo me!) So, can democracy survive in such an environment?

Because in a democracy people are of intrinsic worth and, grasping that, you begin to see how endlessly interesting they are. Real democracy abets community. You begin to see peoples’ kaleidoscopic and mysterious characters, along with all the ways they have chosen to present themselves. It’s as if we are all playing dress-up for one another. The ones who are dangerous are those who forgot we are playing.

I know I am describing only a little of the enormity of our betrayal. And even that little I’m not sure I understand. I only know it to be true as evidenced by the massive inequality that leaves us impoverished no matter how hard we work. The machinery of that betrayal, operating every day, is capitalism. And it is right there, in this 21st century of ignorance, hatred, and inhumanity, that I am joined to everyone else: in the face of this betrayal, we all require the assurance of justice, we are all looking for a way to live with dignity. “Must we pretend we haven’t been betrayed?”

Is it too much to ask for a world in which it is understood that if you can only win by killing other people you are playing the wrong game?

Ask your doctor if capitalism is right for you.

And what do I do about this nagging voice that says, “Too late. Too late.” The voice of defeat, of despair, of excuses, of failure. First notes of the Sirens’ song. And it doesn’t matter if you’re enthralled by their singing or just rowing over there to ask them to shut up for god’s sake—the waves are as violent and the rocks as sharp.

Outside the frame of the narrative that electoral politics must adhere to, there is everything we’re not supposed to talk about. How is it that of all the things happening in the world each day, all news media alight on the same three or four “stories?” Add in professional sports and celebrity gossip and you crowd out most of the suffering of the world, and more importantly, the questions we would then be likely to ask. Nothing about our political discourse acknowledges that our actions have consequences elsewhere in the world, spreading like the as yet unrealized root system of the future.

We see past events as if they are sealed in their moment, flash frozen, bagged, and labelled; we see them as having once occurred, when they ought to be seen as having once begun, as having initiated another skein of ramifications, consequences, precedents, “the worsening cascade / of traumas.” Too many historians are taxidermists. Too much of history is a diorama of so-called progress.

The line for the shelter, the wait at the border, the list for the appointment, the single-file row outside the polling place, the long and lengthening column of need…. Too many people have been fooled into believing that because the line behind them is getting longer, they are moving up. Good people attempt to act decently and honorably, but how that attempt is defined and directed is mediated and circumscribed by the overarching reality of a brutal system that, always and everywhere, puts profits before people, that turns blood—and love, and dreams, and families, and communities—into money.

Ask your doctor if capitalism is right for you.

What continues unabated is the militarization of everything. Are we girding for war because we need to be prepared? Or are we making wars to support the weapons industry? And who is “we”? When you privatize the fire department, arson becomes a related industry.

I am trying to confront despair, not run from it, not merely distract myself with activities or pleasures or neurotically small concerns. I am a grandfather. I grew up marching on Washington, holding a sign that read: WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS. That was before I became a parent, and before I was afforded the grace that grandchildren bring; before I could have understood the enormity of the grief and rage of a parent in Gaza, holding the headless corpse of his toddler.

And before I understood that we, who are paying for this, have paid in advance, again and again, no matter which party is in power. I recall some years ago seeing Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a Republican, on TV talking about the way “the team” made decisions concerning Afghanistan. Looking every bit the customer service professional—same dress as a real estate agent, same disingenuous friendliness, same professional smile, practical and strategic, learned no doubt at a sales seminar in a Westin hotel ballroom somewhere—she was talking about the difficulty they, “the team,” had in deciding which of two cities to bomb—Kabul, with a population of 4 million or Mazar-i-Sharif, home to 500,000 people.

And that was some years after this exchange:

Both of those wars were preceded by millions of people in capital cities around the world saying no, emphatically no. I can’t help but find that fact demoralizing. Since our tax dollars pay for the killing—maybe we should abandon the story that we are fighting for our “values” and admit we’re being held hostage.

For a long time I believed that animosities, politically and historically intractable, might be soluble in empathy. I’m pained and somewhat ashamed to admit I no longer believe that. Hundreds of videos, reports, photographs, and testimonies have so far done little to mobilize my government to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Gaza’s murdered children, their crushed, bloody, limbless, starving bodies, their cries, fail to move those who could put an end to their suffering.

I’m reminded that some scientists worried that the atomic bomb being readied to drop on Hiroshima might inadvertently ignite the whole of earth’s atmosphere, reducing the planet itself to a cinder. Of course they dropped it anyway. And, what a relief, it only killed or maimed a quarter of a million people.

It could be that those who are able to override empathy, to reduce their hearts’ temperature below any fellow-feeling, even for children, are also the ones most likely to succeed in hierarchies of power; what’s more, their success makes them, in a celebrity culture, personages. Take for example the “personage” of the late US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, responsible for millions of deaths in Southeast Asia, South Africa, and Latin America, feted by an elite group of Wall Street chieftains and media celebrities at The New York Public Library on his 100th birthday. A clear conscience is a short memory.

But the young, the young! The uncorrupted, uncompromising young! I am in awe of them. Even though there is no draft, as there was when I was their age, so no immediate threat to their lives, they are outraged on behalf of “land and water poisoned, innocents dying.” They are refusing, or trying to refuse, to pay the moral price for comfort, for numbness, even when it comes with the blandishments of consumerism. I sense that behind their outrage is a resolve greater than any we have seen before, along with an adamant refusal to “surrender to lies that will require more lying.”

Young people are demonstrating, alright. They are demonstrating what a university means. They are demonstrating what a democracy is. They are demonstrating fearlessness, and how to listen to the most vulnerable. They are demonstrating what a human being is.

They understand something not apparent to their elders: that we are not living in an imperfect democratic society, but in a partially realized fascist one, and that we are way past making adjustments. Even the planet is telling us that loud and clear. Will leadership emerge from younger people who can chart the way to a world organized on a different footing? I am not optimistic, but hopeful. In any case, their elders had better support them or get out of their way.

Some weeks after the police broke up the student encampment, I was asked by some recent Emerson College alumni, former students of mine, if I would read my poems at a demonstration on Alumni Day. “We’re not planning to be arrested,” said the young person who was inviting me, “but you know, it’s possible. I just want to put that out there for you to consider.”

The student encampment had been largely what we would have called a teach-in back in the day. Students were sharing a new knowledge of the history and politics of Israel and Palestine. Questions were being raised, particularly about the received narrative. Perforations made by pointed facts began to tatter and then shred the story as they had always heard it. It is hard to think that the college administration’s violent response was not a defense of that narrative, until now widely unexamined.

The alumni who had invited me were organizing their demonstration around a few speakers and musicians, and their intent, beyond solidarity with the current students, was to distribute flyers with information, bibliographies, and links to relevant websites—in other words, again, the sharing of knowledge that pierces propaganda’s veil, which is the whole purpose of a college or university. Or was, until capitalism carefully sucked it from its shell and left it, like a Ukrainian Easter Egg, looking more beautiful, better than ever, but hollow.

When I arrived, there was only a smattering of people. I thought I must have been early but I checked and I was right on time. I saw a small group huddling in conversation near the doors to the auditorium and decided to approach them, listening for any mention of a demonstration. Of course it was the alumni group I was looking for, or at least the nucleus of it. A few more minutes and the numbers swelled. They were waiting for the much larger group of alumni to emerge from the auditorium, planning to engage them with music, poetry, and conversation, while handing out material. It was very relaxed, no police except for a single young campus cop near the door of the auditorium. Not like the earlier encampment when the school’s administration, threatened by a free and open discourse (accompanied by some unfortunate chants, not unlike the sprinkling of agitators in the 60’s, chanting Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh who, as it turns out, were employed to discredit the protests,) responded with police violence. Arrests were made, the area “cleared.” Students paid a high price: injuries, suspensions, loss of scholarship support, expulsions, court dates. Within a few months, the college’s president blamed declining enrollment and substantial cuts to faculty, staff, and programs, on the students who had gathered to share their youthful outrage. In fact, everyone in higher education had been anticipating the downturn in the 18-25-year-old demographic for more than a decade. But, hey, when the young are being betrayed everywhere and refusing, any longer, to pretend they are not, what’s one more compromised adult scapegoating them from a position of authority? All wars are wars on the young.

For the alumni demonstration I had chosen poems that tried to speak to a thirst for the truth; at the same time I tried to strike a balance between starkness and grace, between clear-sightedness and song. That was how I thought about it. Those had been the poems’ aspirations, anyway. Some were earnest and lyrical, others elegiac, others satirical. I don’t think I’d ever had such an intent audience. I read just shy of half an hour. After, it felt very different from any other reading I’d ever given. I was flushed with adrenaline but also very quiet; energized and calmed. As things wound down and I was packing up to go, the young campus cop approached and said he liked the poems and asked where could he read them. “That one with the repeating phrase, what was it, about ‘the flesh and blood we paid?’ was that it?” I’d printed it out for the reading so I gave it to him, he thanked me, and I watched him walk away reading it.

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