The Marks Are Waiting
Informed by the politics of everyday life in the New York School, Lorenzo Thomas demonstrates how to turn the politics of media language into poetry. In the first half of his hybrid work, Thomas mines the dissociated and conflicted language of the media as a continuous presentation of political irony; in the second half, he unpacks the terms of this constantly present, degraded language into a larger political framework. Permanent war, serial emergencies, depraved politicians, offshore finance capital, and mass bread and circuses in the 1990s led to the national security state in the new millennium. Thomas’s analysis, between diatribe and improvisation, creates a space in poetry where the poet can reflect, in a hipster idiom that is at once ironic and immediate, on the reality of the crimes that everywhere surround us but which are ignored every day. Thomas’s synthesis of aesthetic and political concerns reflects his early involvement, in the 1960s, with the Umbra Workshop on the Lower East Side, a group that included Ishmael Reed, Calvin C. Hernton, and David Henderson and was influential for the Black Arts Movement. During the same period, Thomas was friendly with many second-generation New York School poets like Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Ted Greenwald, and he pursued a multicultural aesthetic that was informed by his Caribbean background. Lorenzo Thomas died in 2005.
Our new acuity
Has been misread
As short attention span
But all our aptitude for euphemism
Has been stretched
Like the elastic
In a pair of drawers
Floating around our hips
Uncomfortably
We behold the birth of a new world
Odder than the ones before
In the blue gloom of tv light in Darien
In Pueblo Heights, in College Station
Imagination wilting
Our shopping malls explode with petrojunk
Become necessities
Recycled endlessly
As yellow ribbon
The computers spit out
Inventories of foreshortened amnesia
Long lists of metaphors now obsolete
Willing acceptance of the reprehensible
Lite War
Reports of suffering
Enough to satisfy
But low on passion
You must give up outmoded ideas
New and improved
Marinetti to Super Mario III
Forget
Honor or hygiene
Flushing the planet with
Blood
It’s cleaner to think of
Punitive surgery
Competition
Forget it old hat
Sort of like a lethal Olympics
Strategy A game of checks
A commerce cruel enough to make E. F. Hutton
Hard sell canard
Shut up but not shut down
Patriotism of the ploy du jour?
The boys in the backroom
Will come up with an ideology
If that still gets it
A 24-7 sideshow
No business but police business
It’s never out it’s never over
Is what remains, a bit of theatre
Going on all the time
A murderous roadshow
With out-of-town tryouts
For smart bombs and stealth politicians
Without a Broadway to go to
____________
If history can still be understood as a record of the deeds of leaders, then recent history of the United States is the record of bizarre plots and frantic attempts to cover their behinds performed by an amazingly conscienceless batch of born-again hypocrites and felons-in-waiting. Shameless and possibly insane, these men have presided over the decay of both cities and countryside and the demoralization of citizens facing a plummeting standard of living.
If history is properly a narrative of the collective tropism of masses of people, then our recent history is the tale of a populace mesmerized by ever more technically elaborate and intellectually vacuous entertainments designed to distract them from their deepening poverty.
All of the traditional events of the Olympic games are, in fact, martial arts. The rationale of the games, however, is the display of martial prowess in the interest of intertribal nonbelligerence. If these “war games” can, in fact, be construed as simultaneous competition and international cooperation, we have a perfect model for conceptual confusion that can do much more than merely stimulate sales of beer, exercise clothing, and motor vehicles.
For a population addicted to entertainment, demented leaders have invented real war presented as games. The names should be familiar: Grenada, Panama, Kuwait (or Iraq). There are also the minor league games: El Salvador, Nicaragua. Then there’s the really funky training camp called Bosnia. Somehow, if you ask folks, you’ll find that most people know more details about the 1956 World Series than about any of these campaigns. But each one was presented in the papers and on radio and tv just like the real thing and—of course—for the unfortunate human beings maimed or killed in those places, it was the real thing.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell showed how leaders could manipulate populations by preying upon a usefully inarticulate combination of patriotism and self-interest. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 went further in showing the way that scapegoating becomes the instrumentality of such a system. The current permanent crisis provides opportunity for ambitious men to keep busy while thinking they are performing historic deeds; and the public, fitfully distracted by incomprehensible events occurring in never-heard-of places, remains confused. Gore Vidal, educated to find causes for effects, has guessed that the transformation of the United States into a “national security state” in the late 1940s explains the subsequent armed adventures of the past decade, but that means taking these escapades seriously. Actually, the old Roman recipe for ruling is at work: keep the people in line with bread and circuses.
Less bread, more circuses. When there’s really nothing worth seeing, the show goes on all night long.
PUBLICATION: Knowledge (1998), 10:71–73.
KEYWORDS: African American poetics; politics; cultural studies; media.
LINKS: Ben Friedlander, “Lyrical Interference” (PJ 9); Félix Guattari, “Language, Consciousness, and Society” (PJ 9); Lyn Hejinian, “An American Opener” (PJ 1); Harryette Mullen, “Miscegentated Texts and Media Cyborgs: Technologies of Body and Soul” (Guide; PJ 9); Kofi Natambu, “The Multicultural Aesthetic: Language, ‘Art,’ and Politics in the United States Today” (PJ 9); Delphine Perret, “Irony” (PJ 3); Kit Robinson, “Pleasanton/Embassy Suite” (PJ 10); Andrew Ross, “The Oxygen of Publicity” (PJ 6).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African-American Literature (New York: Teachers and Writers, 1998); Extraordinary Measures: Afro-Centric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000); Don’t Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Chances Are Few (Berkeley: Blue Wind, 1979; 2nd ed., 2003); The Bathers (New York: I. Reed Books, 1981); There Are Witnesses (Osnabrück, Germany: OBEMA, 1996); Dancing on Main Street (Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2004).