'Otherwise, as Apolitical as Possible"

“If Ralph Nader is for it, I am against it; otherwise, as apolitical as possible.” 

That sort of common sense becomes as rare as humility by the hour. It’s the time of year when we start filling the recycling bin with unsolicited, unread campaign literature. This season’s favored form is the oversized postcard, sparsely worded, all photos and primary colors. If the candidate is male, sleeves rolled, arms akimbo, failing to look Lincolnesque; if female, a sober suit and lots of teeth. The wisecrack at the top is from an unlikely source – a poet -- which boosts its comic quotient: Turner Cassity (1929-2009). Another Cassity quip, also from an interview: “You are not going to get me to say something about ‘the human condition.’ It is a phrase I do not allow to pass my lips.”

 

We were recently disappointed and bored by Oppenheimer, a rare recent film I was looking forward to seeing. Instead, I suggest you read The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) by Richard Rhodes, one of the essential nonfiction books of our age. At the time of his death, Cassity left two unpublished books of poems: Hitler’s Weather and Poems for Isobel. Cassity’s literary executor, R.L. Barth, sent me copies of the manuscripts. In the former is included “Oppie in the Heartland.” “Oppie” is J. Robert Oppenheimer:

 

“End of the World, for Pentecostal outreach groups

In 1930s farm states, so preoccupies

Revivals that not much is heard of cards, strong drink,

And missionaries. Not that, ordinarily,

The End is spelled out in detail. The Last Trump sounds;

Imagination does the rest, and memories

Of illustrations from the Dore Bible. Meant

As an apotheosis, Come-To-Jesus seems

Almost a comedown. But with 1945

And the atomic bomb, and possibility

The world in fact may end, the tent revivalists

Fall strangely quiet. Some, the more sophisticated,

Take on godless communism; most fall back

To battling Darwin. Missionaries may have lost

Cachet, along with China, and as a destroyer

Of worlds J. Robert Oppenheimer, stringy build

And hair out of control, have less the look of Shiva

Than of, say, Hank Williams, Sr.--and be fit

Reminder that the worlds of gambling and of drink

Go on--yet change and incongruity cannot

Prevent re-labeling as ‘Rapture’ what was once

The Day of Judgment, or to anti-Darwin minds

Point out that Fundamentalism too evolves.”

 

Cassity possesses a quality largely absent in poets and probably in the rest of us: thoughtful unpredictability.