“A few doors
farther on, the lawn is spiked
With signs
for candidates I’ve long disliked.
Just seeing
their names induces in me fear
Less
supernatural but much more near
At hand than
those that haunt the children’s dreams.”
Even if I
voted, I can’t imagine wanting to clutter my lawn with a candidate’s signs. There’s
something tacky about it, and somehow it reminds me of the sort of driver who
blasts bad music from his car with the windows rolled down. I’m not objecting
to anyone exercising his First Amendment rights. My first objection is aesthetic.
Then I reject what Joseph Epstein has called “dueling virtues.” In
his notebooks, Michael Oakeshott has the definitive word: “Politics are an inferior
form of human activity.” Today, they are the default mode for people looking
for an excuse to get angry and believe in something.
“Autumn Road,”
the final poem in Wilson’s new collection, is only incidentally concerned with politics.
Eleven lines after the passage cited above, he returns to another sense of “signs”:
“Where the
ancient mind saw signs, ours now denies
To it all
but the most material meaning.”
We’ve worked
hard to drain the world of meaning. He follows the two lines just quoted with
these:
“I’m not so
sure. It seems that thoughts are leaning
Up against
every fence post, and the earth,
Stared at,
stares back and quietly brings to birth
Between us
words, morals, and promises
Which we
might overlook but can’t dismiss.”
2 comments:
One of the great ironies to me as a young man was that I was eligible to be conscripted and fight in the Vietnam War, yet was not allowed to vote. Since my return from a tour in Vietnam, I have voted at every opportunity.
I am not influenced by public political signs. I consider them a benign part of American life and much less tacky than much other yard ornamentation.
Sadly, one cannot even express dismay over the pestilence of politics, much less abstain from the circus, without causing offense to the "informed voter." Such is the nature of our times.
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