'Words, Morals, and Promises'

It’s a seasonal blight, these thickets of signs defacing lawns before Election Day. More toxic and less attractive than mushrooms after a spring rain, do they sway anyone’s vote? And why a dozen identical signs on a single lawn, all touting the same candidate? Are they analogous to Christmas lights or something more sinister? Politics for many has usurped the role once played by religion. Are the signs declarations of faith? Curses? Threats? James Matthew Wilson writes in “Autumn Road” (The Hanging God, Angelico Press, 2018):

“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.”