We Cannot Praise Super-Committee Idea Too Highly
Motions from the Floor.
Amendments.
Objections.
Filibusters.
Will the Gentleman Yield His Scruples?
Will the Gentlewoman Kindly Have Her Head Examined?
Will the Super-Committee of Congress Kiss the Collective Ass of All Super-Sized Customers of these United States?
Color me incredulous, but I don’t see how this Debt-Ceiling agreement does anything that hasn’t been done before it. Namely, it perpetuates the partisan nature of debate. It muddies the headwaters from which all clear deliberations might emanate. And, in so many disingenuous ways, the recently passed resolution of Congress opens the door to oligarchic dogmatics ad infinitum.
Michele Glazer
Michele Glazer, in Metonymic Sonnet, hints at the rhetorical flourishes which are surely coming down the pike:
To the chairman having his way in the chair with the minutes.
To the motion he makes to suspend them.
To a hole in the sky
wide enough to see through.
Let’s sew this up, says the chairman.
To the matter at hand
and the handle he has on it. To the hand he has in it.
And to the secretary, writing it down, taking the minutes.
The chair sits.
His face flushes like a sun gathering color before the sky’s won over and the dark takes hold.
Then moistens. The chair loosens his tie.
To the consummate still life:
the conference table and the water glasses sweating
and the coat tossed over the back of the chair.
***
The issue, it seems to me, has nothing to do with the principled speeches with which politicians ply their trade. Nor is it with the glad-handing, back-room maneuvering that undoubtedly happens all the time. The issue festers amid the non-reflective use of language. Linguistics. I once heard a lawyer employ the phrase, “communicate to prevail” — which implies an agenda that actually fails to communicate entirely. But the irony is — this very failure then passes for “dialogue.” Authentic conversation may happen among society’s losers, but among the winners an entire universe is manufactured in which they no longer consider their own weaknesses and blind spots.
E.E. Cummings nailed this back in 1926, just prior to the Stock Market Crash:
["next to of course god america i]“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gory
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beauty-
flu than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
***
E.E. Cummings
Cummings, you see, does not abide abstractions. He flouts the big ideas that often keep the powerful in power. He once said, “Think twice before you think.”
And perhaps that’s the only way we have to combat the propaganda that’s soon to be spun on the 24 hour news cycle. We have the poetic and pre-cognitive ways of encountering other people and other things. We have at our disposal the syntax that refuses the sales pitch, the serious play of syllables and the hope that someone will hear even if our grammar ain’t perfect.
Peace–
through your fingers
