Bad poetry and the Biden Inauguration

Jan 21

Jan 21 Bad poetry and the Biden Inauguration

Jan 21, 2021

I AM MISSING Donald Trump already, despite my former Trump Fatigue Fatigue. At the very least, he was box office and a stimulation to the senses. Still, it feels our species’ collective blood pressure has lost a few metres of mercury over the last day.

After this catastrophic multiple pile-up of a Presidency, there is a planet full of rubberneckers who would have loved to see Trump being dragged out of the front entrance of the White House, his preposterous hair askew and a look of bloody murder on his ghastly visage.

Instead, after the QAnon-inspired Kristallnacht on January 6 and all the talk of impeachment and the 25th Amendment, it has all ended in a strangely unsatisfactory anticlimax.

In his final public appearance as the Leader of the Free World, the Donald said “we did what we came here to do, and so much more.” He adds, “I am especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars.” I guess that’s actually something, though by all accounts he got dangerously close to trying to blow up both North Korea and Iran.

According to various U.S. media sources, the Worst President of All Time used the last few days of office to sell pardons, apparently at $2 million a pop. He’s box office, but he is also corrupt down to his very bone marrow.

At the inauguration of Trump’s senescent successor, a lot of attention was paid to a “show-stealing” recital of a poem by the 22-year old Amanda Gorman. The poem is as much a symptom of the American malaise as the four-year train wreck that preceded it.

When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.
We braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.

Oscar Wilde wrote that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” He was wrong: some of it springs from ersatz feelings too. This was a torrent of sententious, poorly-crafted, adolescent poppycock about pursuing what “stands before us” and not what “stands between us”, about striving to be better and putting our differences aside as a nation. It was completely, unequivocally, unambiguously without any poetic talent whatsoever.

Gorman also deploys that maddening poet cadence - with its pregnant pauses and its uplifting changes of rhythm and tempo. As she speaks, she waves her hands in the air like she is playing an imaginary piano. Still, she cannot disguise the paucity of her language. If this is what “wows the crowd” these days, then only a God can save us.

I find a compilation of Twitter reactions and see American after American expressing “pride”, wiping away tears at the pomp and beauty of this great ceremony, and expressing hope that things have returned to normal after four years of orange-tinted mayhem. Sanctimony prevails. Emotion rules where reason should be. No one, least of all the liberal press, is scrutinising why Trump was elected in the first place.

Perhaps Trump’s greatest crime was to shatter the image of the American Presidency as a force of decorum and dignity, as an institute of progress and reason. It was as if the Vatican had been converted into a crack den.

With this in mind, I hereby compose my alternative Inauguration Poem: