Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Last year I was called in these pages an old beatnik, an anarchist, and an atheist-Marxist; and our kids were all for it. It made me sound a lot more exciting, and it took them back to the old days. In 1970, as we moved, with our four young children, into our present house, our next-door neighbor-to-be ran around crying, “A bunch of hippies are moving into Driftwood!” The bumper sticker on her large car said, “The St. Petersburg Times is very well RED.”
Well, I’d been too busy to be a real hippie, but I did have a goatee. I was an assistant professor at Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd), and we thought of ourselves as normal middle-class Americans. Of course, we had marched against LBJ and the Vietnam War — who didn’t? — but our new neighbor didn’t know that. I doubt if she knew that Trotsky also had a goatee, either; in 1970, any extra hair was a dividing line. (Who’d want to look like Trotsky, anyway? He died with an icepick in his head, wielded by an assassin hand-picked by Stalin.)
In the first paragraph of our new book, I urge all young poets — even those “who actually live in garrets, to participate and bear witness. Poets are citizens, too.” Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, Socialists, Reformists, Tea Partyers and Atheists: Join in, speak up! This is democracy. In those aforementioned “old days” I was a great fan of William F. Buckley’s TV talk show, Firing Line. I seldom agreed with Buckley, who was a pro-Joseph McCarthy conservative, but I admired, not just his wit, but his willingness to debate (really debate, no interrupting or name-calling) people like Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Norman Mailer, and a great variety of others, including Muhammad Ali, and that other, more famous Marx, Groucho.
2012 will be a major year in American history. We’ll have a series of clean-cut choices, no matter who’s chosen as the Republican nominee — the Republican battle shows pretty clearly what the party stands for. While you still can find intelligent Buckley-like Republicans — there are debatable philosophical differences between the parties, after all — they must be badly outnumbered, because at one time or another Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich have been leading in the Republican polls, with Sarah Palin cartwheeling in the background. Right now Rick Santorum is inching up toward their unpopular figurehead, Mitt Romney, who not only blatantly switches sides but defends political ads that are also blatant fabrications, using tape eraser on old quotes. Jon Huntsman argues the moderate conservative case, but doesn’t seem to be gaining much ground with the overheated Republican primary voter.
If you believe universal health care is the moral duty of civilized nations you’ll vote one way; if not you’ll vote another.
If you believe banks and businesses don’t need to be regulated to protect us and stop our surging income gap, you’ll vote one way; if not, another.
If you believe the poor are poor because they deserve it, you’ll vote one way; if not, another.
If you’re concerned about passing on a safer environment to your children… We could go on a long time like this, but you get the idea.
Right now our brand of capitalism is like the law of the jungle, where the lions sniff out the weakest in a herd of antelopes, pounce on them, and let the hyenas loping behind scarf up every last scrap of flesh. Hey, that’s natural. But we’re human, and we can do better than that. Our situation may be scary, but at least it’s clear. Happy New Year!
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress for all mankind.
—Both quotes from “In Memoriam” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2012.