No human involvement

  Update from yesterday’s post:

After two emails and an office visit (for which I was chastised by the head of HR for appearing “unannounced”—her actual word; evidently an “open-door policy”—again, her words—means something other than actually, you know, “open”), the chick reputedly managing benefits for my company reluctantly emailed me what she said was our dental plan ID number, along with the advice that I could call Cigna.

Which, when I gave it to the dentist yesterday, turned out to be…not anything recognizable as a plan number for Cigna. (Look—I’m clueless about it, but in this matter I’m inclined to take the word of anyone in a dental office over that of anyone in HR.)

So I had to pay $130 for the consultation and will need to square it away with the insurance company. Deep joy—because there’s nothing more fun than dental work, unless it’s dental work plus fighting with an insurance company.

I should have known that with one job to do, this chick would not get it right. And that when she hawked up a response that basically was “here’s-the-plan-number-call-Cigna-to-find-out-anything-useful-now-go-away”, I should just have called the insurance company. It may be tempting the gods to say that Cigna couldn’t do a worse job of customer service than HR, but since I’m going to have to do it anyway, I should have gone first to the horse’s mouth instead of the other end.

Oh, the humanity

Over the years of my career, it’s been my observation that one constant in every organization is that human resources is just baffling.

As in: I cannot for the life of me grasp how these people stay employed.

I get it that despite using the term “human” in the department title, their sole function is to protect the interests of company management. (Calling them “People Operations”, “Employee Success” or “Employee Experience” doesn’t change that in the least.) Their only interest in actual humans is to ensure that they do not sue the corporation for violating any laws, while disbursing the absolute minimum in the way of monetary outlay they can get away with.

Because shareholder value.

This has been my experience in multi-national corporations of tens of thousands of employees and very small start-ups. The only ones that haven’t fallen into this pattern are the ones too small to have a human resources department. As soon as someone with the letters SPHR after their name is hired, we’re on the slide down to bafflement.

(And the only department to rival HR in that wonder is Marketing. Honest to God, in so many places, Marketing cannot find its way out of a paper bag with a compass and a seeing eye dog. And I’ve worked in Marketing, and I still can’t figure out why it collectively screws the pooch.)

The denizens of HR here are certainly upholding the honor of the profession. I’ve mentioned before how they touted with great fanfare that they were creating an “Employee Downtime” area by replacing several tables in the employee lunchroom with a couple of couches, three TV monitors and a foosball table, for which no one asked. I don’t like to think how much money that cost—money that could have gone into coffee- and tea-making facilities.

But apparently the effort to stand up the down-area plumb wore HR out, because you practically have to file a FOIA request to get any information about your healthcare benefits. The one person in the department who has that remit never replies to a query the first time around; it’s only after multiple emails and voicemails that she’ll graciously condescend to give you an ort from the table—like…the group ID number for the dental plan.

Seriously—why offer the benefit if you’re going to block people from using it?

Oh, wait—never mind. I answered my question back in graf 3 above.

The question for which I do not have an answer is: to whom does one report HR?

Minority report

I’m one of 372 people outside the ballroom of the Washington Hilton who watched Hasan Minhaj’s speech at the White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner this weekend. It’s usually a cross between a high school talent show and a Friars Club roast, all centered around the occupant of the White House. But the occupant of the White House has usually had an actual sense of humor plus a thick skin, and of course that’s not the case this year.

In fact, the Kleptocrat announced with extended lower lip in February that he would not be attending the WHCD, the first president since Ronald Reagan to skip the event. (Reagan was recovering from an assassination attempt, and even then he phoned in to make a couple of jokes and take his lumps from the journos.) Then the Cheeto-in-Chief directed his Gauleiters to also abstain. Because these people literally cannot take a joke.

Instead the Kleptocrat went to Harrisburg, Penn., to hold a party rally (yes), where he told porkies about how large the crowd was there. The guy really doesn’t understand how the whole smartphone camera, connectivity and social media thing works:

Also—what is it about this guy and size?

The rally was his platform for lying about all his accomplishments during his first hundred days in office. He filled in the space between lies with pouting about the people who are so unfair to him—the press—who he would have us believe were secretly wishing they were up in Pennsylvania instead of at the dinner.

Okay, but back to Minhaj. He said a few things that I thought were dead on target—not directly to do with the Kleptocrat, but with the absolutely critical role the press—the free press—has to play in not only combating the rising tide of fascism, but in the fundamental survival of democracy. He started with a jokey survey of the various media outlets in attendance, before getting around to CNN, the USA Today of broadcast news. (Actually, earlier he took on USA Today, and was pretty funny.)

“CNN is here, baby. Now you guys got some really weird trust issues going on with the public. I’m not going to call you fake news, but everything isn’t breaking news. You can’t go to DEFCON 1 just because Sanjay Gupta found a new moisturizer.”

And this is true—the media in some ways are their own worst enemies, rushing all over the place trying to get something out there before it appears on some blog in Dubuque. Also, leaving aside the failure to confirm the veracity of their stories, they dilute their impact when every story is slapped up as a stop-the-presses kind of breaking news jobber.

Minhaj also calls it correctly when he talks about it being a trust issue. It’s not just the Kelptocrat and the Gauleiters and the Repugnants muddying the waters with their screeches about fake news every time someone reports what they’ve said and done. Although Lord knows, they are muddying the waters. But he goes on to nail it:

“I know I’m busting balls. I don’t have a solution on how to win back trust. I don’t. But in the age of [the Kleptocrat], I know that you guys have to be more perfect now more than ever. Because you are how the president gets his news. Not from advisers, not from experts, not from intelligence agencies, you guys. So that’s why you gotta be on your A-game. You gotta be twice as good. You can’t make any mistakes. Because when one of you messes up, he blames your entire group. And now you know what it feels like to be a minority.”

I don’t much give a toss about the media being accurate reporters because they’re how the Kleptocrat gets his information—he’s going to cherry pick whatever fact or fiction suits his notional reality, whatever gets him what he wants in any given moment. I do care that the news media be able to demonstrate integrity and rigor in publishing or broadcasting because I need to trust them. And because all thoughtful, truth-seeking people need to trust them. And because somewhere along the line, the courts of justice and of history are going to need to be able to trust them as a source of facts about this administration and our society.

I also think he called it when he categorized the press as a minority—both collectively and individually held responsible for the actions of the worst among them. You screw up—everyone with a press pass (and their editors and their publishers) takes the hit. One reporter from the not-failing New York Times elides a statue in the Oval Office (subsequently correcting the mistake), and the second-rate Goebbels starts screaming how every news story is massively fake. And he’s believed.

That’s exactly how minorities are viewed in this society, and I think it would be really good for the news industry to consider that—both as it applies to themselves and to how they report on other minorities. If a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel misspells some Gauleiter’s wife’s name, the entire US Press Association should not have to file affidavits abjuring misspelling Gauleiters’ wives’ names. Ditto seeking statements from black, or Muslim, or Asian community leaders when one of their members goes postal.

(Although, of course we do want to encourage all reporters to verify the spelling of Gauleiters’ wives’ names—and everyone else’s names, as well as all other facts in their stories that they can cram in and still meet their deadlines. Because see above about being the trusted source of news about the world we live in and will leave to our descendants. When the Kleptocrat, his Gauleiters and the Repugnants in Congress can lie about things they have been recorded saying and doing—those records are all that stand between us and a Buñuel film.)

Like Minhaj, I don’t have any solution, just a suggestion—that they do not debase their journalistic coinage and turn out crap like Breitbart or the Drudge Report. And that they hold fast against the threats that the Kleptocrat is thinking about changing libel laws, making it easier to sue publications. Because the hometown paper absolutely has it right:

Gratitude Monday: May Day

It’s Gratitude Monday and it’s International Workers Day and it’s May Day.

So I’m grateful for Spring in Northern Virginia. For drifts of azaleas and clouds of dogwood. For the explosions of leaves on trees and eruptions of hostas through the mulch.

(I’m not so grateful for allergies and a bad hair day that will last through mid-September, tbh, but that’s the price I pay for the change in seasons.)

This year I’m also grateful for the anticipation of putting out tomato plants and a summer of suppers alternating between caprese salads and poached chicken breasts with tomato mayonnaise, with glasses of Pinot Gris or Prosecco to sip. Because there is nothing in this world like tomatoes you bring into the kitchen still warm from the vine.

I’m also grateful for workers of every stripe—Metro drivers, baristas, call center representatives, trash guys, help desk techs, grocery shelf stockers, factory workers, pharmacists—all of them. This year I’m also keeping in my thoughts journalists, editors and publishers; judges all up and down the line; teachers and teacher aides; ACLU lawyers; federal employees; Congressional staff-who-answer-phones (sorry, guys, I know you’re on the front line of a war you probably never saw coming; wars are like that) and the men and women of our armed services.

(The Kleptocrat, his Gauleiters and Congressmorons too spineless to #doyourjob—not so much. For the precise reason that they are not fulfilling the fundamental part of their oath of office, which is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.)

Back in the last century the skipper of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower used to close his morning announcement by saying, “Thanks for coming to work today.” Well, it was a little dopy, because it’s not like anyone aboard ship had any choice in the matter. But we all need to consider what our day would be like if someone didn’t do their job, and we all like to be appreciated for doing our job.

May Day/International Workers Day has traditionally been a time for the laboring classes to march, and it’s been a day for bloodshed, as left- and right-wing extremists fought in the streets, both here and abroad. I’m hoping we won’t see that kind of thing today, although given the kind of organized provocation by supporters of the Kleptocrat at protests and marches recently, I know this is wishful thinking.

Still—this isn’t about Big Movements, this is about small gratitude; my gratitude. So I’m focusing on appreciating the world around me, natural and man-made.

Resistance moon: The voice was chanting

We’ve reached the end of National Poetry Month, another journey through humanity and the universe we inhabit as seen through the lens of those we trust to distil it down to its most basic chemistry. Coincidentally we’ve just passed Day 100 of the Kleptocrat’s rule—a point at which we were promised we’d see great things, believe me. And then, in the past couple of weeks, we were told that the first hundred days are a completely artificial construct, so unfair, so we’re not to expect…well, whatever it was we were told we’d be getting by now.

What a maroon.

I’m grateful to have had the poems to focus on these past 30 days. To remind myself that we as human beings have endured worse than the Kleptocrat—even we as Americans. Letting the poets deconstruct both repression and resistance down to the basics has been therapeutic. A crowd of sorrows, an artillery round, a politician’s spit, a bear’s DNA, a Green Card, a mansplaining bishop, an order given in Polish—these are the building blocks of both the good and the evil that we contain within ourselves. It’s up to choose, as Anne Sexton pointed out so succinctly, how we’re going to face it.

Well, this is the end of the month, but not of the road—pretty sure that the Gauleiters have more tricks up their brown-shirted sleeves, and we need to soldier on. As the abolitionist and liberal activist Wendell Phillips said in 1852, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.”

It’s not clear to me why this sentence is not being repeated at every public gathering these days. It’s also depressing as hell to realize that this kind of crap—power taking from the many to give to the few—keeps coming around and around.

So to close out this month, I’ll give you something that dates from the last big national crisis in the 1930s and 40s, from another man of the heartland. Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie was from Oklahoma, which—as I hope to God you know—was one of the hardest-hit areas of the Dust Bowl. When I was a kid my mother, a third-generation Californian, still sniffed about the Okies, who’d flooded the state decades before. (One of the best takes on their welcome to the Golden State is in Guthrie’s “Do-Re-Mi”, and one of my favorite takes on that is by John Mellancamp.) Guthrie drifted restlessly from one end of the country to the other, walking, hitchhiking and riding the rails; it was from these travels that he distilled the essence of America that became “This Land Is Your Land”.

Like “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “This Land Is Your Land” is a whole lotta wrapped up in unadorned paper: straightforward melody, four chords, easy harmonies. It’s a simple—albeit revolutionary—concept, too: America belongs to all of us, not just the propertied and the powerful. Yeah, it even belongs to the ignorant, the fearful and the aggrieved (although I do wonder what Woody would have made of his heirs in the red states now, voting against their own interests and swallowing in great gulps the claptrap dished out by the plutocrats who got them into the current state of affairs and intend to keep them there)—just not exclusively. It belongs to all of us.

Guthrie was the mortal enemy of fascism. If you enlarge the photo above, you'll note the sticker on his guitar. He would have been at the front of every protest against the Kleptocrat, his Gauleiters and the spineless, lickspittle Repugnants in Congress. And while he was in jail waiting for the ACLU and the twelve gazillion GoFundMe campaigns to get him out, he'd write another shedload of songs about it.

I was at a pub sing a few weeks ago with a roomful of people who perform for pleasure. We were singing largely Anglo-American-Celtic pieces with varying degrees of enthusiasm and confidence. When “This Land” came up, pretty sure the walls of the pub vibrated. Back in January, when the Kleptocrat issued his first failed executive order on banning immigration from select Muslim countries that don’t host any of his business interests, protestors at Philadelphia’s airport sang “This Land”. I cannot imagine a more appropriate choice.

As with “Blowin’”, everyone’s sung “This Land”. Every folk group, starting with The Weavers. Pete Seeger must have sung it about a squillion times in his lifetime. Bernie Sanders—yes mam. Ani DiFranco, Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga the Mormon Tabernacle Choir… Springsteen called it the greatest song ever written about America. (He and Seeger sang it at the Lincoln Memorial to mark the inauguration of President Obama, the event that set off the racists and gave the Kleptocrat traction.)

Here’s Springsteen again, in a recording that melds Woody into his son Arlo’s voice, with Little Richard, Bono, John Mellencamp and Taj Mahal from a PBS show called A Vision Shared, about Guthrie and Leadbelly, the two iconic folksong writers of the Depression.

This cover contains several verses that have been airbrushed out over the years—like the one about the No Trespassing sign and the one I think speaks loudest to me right now:

Nobody living can ever stop me

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

Please carry that thought forward with you. It’s true.

Peace out.

Resistance moon: All the great work of the world

For a good part of the last century, Carl Sandburg was American poetry. A son of the heartland—it don’t come any more heart than Illinois—he won several Pulitzer Prizes, including one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. I’ll never be able to think of Chicago without the epithet he gave it: “hog butcher for the world” and “City of the Big Shoulders”.

Sandburg’s “I am the People, the Mob” fits in with our theme this month of resistance against the kleptocracy. It’s robust, it’s defiant, it’s prophetic. The people will prevail, regardless of what is thrown at them. I love the use of the first person singular pronoun, implying that the great mass of people is a single entity, united in purpose.

It’s the kind of thing that would-be dictators ought to be reminded of. But of course, they don’t ever believe in the people, do they?

“I am the People, the Mob”

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of the world is done

   through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s

   food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come

   from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth

   more Napoleons and Lincolns.

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much

   plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of

   me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but

   Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I

   have. And I forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for

   history to remember. Then—I forget.

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use

   the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me

   last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be

   no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,"

   with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of

   derision.

The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

Resistance moon: Ten thousand miles

Since last year’s presidential election one of the constants has been the theme of resistance, of something that’s protest, but much more than protest. Maybe it’s the new technology of everywhere-connectivity, Internet infrastructure and social media that enables people in their tens of thousands to convert their outrage into action. They’ve taken to the streets in their hundreds of thousands, but they’ve also broken the telephone systems of pretty much every Congressmoron in D.C.—especially the ones who are too cowardly to meet with constituents in person.

Odd, that, how the ‘Pugs were eager to hold town halls right up until they started getting voters who asked questions and wouldn’t accept deflection. And videos of those meetings were slapped up on Facebook and Twitter, showing them for the spineless bloated slugs they are. Right after that—dang, no town hall meetings…

This is protest writ large, and the lines drawn in the sand about immigration, healthcare, SCOTUS and kompromat have played a powerful part in blocking some of the power grabs of the Kleptocrat, his Gauleiters and their Congressional enablers. Viz.:

A HuffPo writer got hold of the >500-page list of people who invested in the Kakistorcrat’s inauguration; she converted it to a spreadsheet, put it on a Google drive and asked Twitter to crowd-source the names. In 24 hours last week We The Digital People drilled down and discovered substantial donations made under questionable names—one of the NASA mathematicians of Hidden Figures fame—and the ever-popular ruse of addresses that were empty fields. After these results came to light, the Klepto-committee made the equally ever-popular admission of those who’ve been caught out in chicanery: “mistakes” were made.

(The digital detectives turned up at least 340 instances. Oopsie! Moreover, in tracking down some of the non-existent names, by focusing on “business” addresses and looking at other building tenants, the diggers found that a number of them have connections to Russian interests. Um.)

And that miserable tool Jason I-Can-Look-My-Daughter-In-The-Eye-But-Not-My-Constituents Chaffetz has not only announced that he won’t seek re-election after his current stint at the trough, but evidently he’s “taking a break” from Congress, because he’s got to have suddenly immediate surgery to correct a previous surgery on his foot. “Previous” = 12 years ago. Nothing to do with evidence mounting that he’s involved in a cover-up of the connections between the Russians and the Kleptocrat and his Gauleiters. Or with the mounting pressure he’s been getting from people around the country to #DoYourJob as chairman of the House Oversight Committee that doesn’t think it’s necessary to investigate anything to do with the Kleptocrat and his Gauleiters. No. This is a “medical emergency” (his words). And evidently he must think with his foot, because he’s going to be “out” from Congress for three weeks.

Well—thinking with his foot might explain some of his actions. And maybe he plumb wore himself out with his interminable “investigations” of Hillary Clinton and Benghazi.

Okay, right—but we’re here for poetry. Poetry and protest. So…gotta be Bob Dylan.

There were protest song writers before Dylan, but he distilled the art form at a time when the nation was looking for a way to articulate rage and revolution. You want to flip the bird at the government, or at the banksters who broke the economy—and you aren’t Elizabeth Warren? Dylan. Need something to restore your flagging energy, or remind you of what’s at stake? Dylan. Just want to clear your mind before the next call to a politician’s office or taking to the streets? Yeah.

With Dylan’s protest songs, we’re dealing with an embarrassment of riches. I’m going to go with a few of my favorites.

The first cover of “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall” I heard was Pete Seeger’s. I was a kid and I had no real grasp of what it was, but the kind of awkward phrasing, jamming syllables into apocalyptic lines whether they fit or not, and the bolshie repetition really made me stop and pay attention. Also—it’s long. It’s early Dylan at his most complex and demanding.

So I’ll give you the young Dylan singing it.

Though it was written during and for the Cold War, “Hard Rain” is still appropriate for our times. Pick a line—any line—and see if it doesn’t resonate: “a dozen dead oceans”; “guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children”; “a young woman whose body was burning”. Do images from the news come to mind? And regarding the “pellets of poison…flooding the waters”, Dylan has said that it’s nothing to do with acid rain, but with the lies we’re fed by various interests. Whoa—that one’s certainly relevant.

“Blowin’ in the Wind”—well, in contrast to “Hard Rain”, that’s pure, distilled Dylan: three verses, five chords on the guitar, easy to harmonize, fills up a hall like the roar of a tsunami. Everyone on the planet knows “Blowin’ in the Wind”, everyone on the planet can sing it, and everyone on the planet understands its meaning. It would be hard to find a song with more universal resonance (outside, perhaps, of “We Shall Overcome”). By the time a performer has finished with “How many roads”, the audience has joined in.

Racism, militarism, Babbitism, general inhumanity and bloody-mindedness: three verses, five chords, easy harmonizing, tsunami roar. Will it be sung 50 years from now? If there are still humans, probably.

Every artist on the planet has covered “Blowin’ in the Wind”. It was the signature piece of Peter, Paul and Mary, closing all their concerts (including their Christmas one at Carnegie Hall). Stevie Wonder, Marianne Faithfull, Sam Cooke, Bruce Springsteen, Marlene Dietrich, Johnny Cash, the Supremes, the London Freakin’ Philharmonic. Joan Baez was one of the first to sing it, and the purity of her early recordings is amazing. Baez, as you know, was one on the frontlines of protest back in the 60s. She’s sung this one throughout her career, around the world. Here she is in Paris, in 1983.

The anthem for those times, though—the Vietnam War, the youth explosion, tie-dying, Woodstock, Watergate, drugs, communes, a president resigning rather than face impeachment—that was “The Times They Are A-changin’”. Someone ought to park a sound truck outside the Capitol and play this one full blast for a week. Every word is as true now as it was when Dylan wrote it in 1964.

The fuckwits and do-nothings inside the building would rightly begin to tremble at it, because they’re still standing in the doorways and blocking up the halls. And the battle outside raging is shaking their windows and rattling their walls.

So many versions to choose from, but I keep coming back to Tracy Chapman, at Dylan’s 30^th Anniversary Concert.

No surrender.

Resistance moon: Children, do you want your freedom?

The city of New Orleans started taking down public monuments to the Confederacy this week. In the night. With the workmen wearing flak jackets and helmets on account of death threats.

Yes—the people who have been strutting about since November, calling the majority of Americans snowflakes, do not see the irony in gloating, “We won, get over it,” while at the same time screaming about the sacrilege of moving on from The Woah. Perhaps they think the statute of limitations for losing bigly—including unconditional surrender—expired after 150 years?

Not for nothing is it called The Lost Cause.

One of the biggest cod-Confederates I’ve seen lately is a politician right here in the Old Dominion, who’s been tweeting up a storm in emulation of his obvious hero, the Kleptocrat, stamping his feet and moaning about how this is desecration of our glorious heritage, etc., etc., etc.

Here’s what you need to know about Corey Stewart: he’s running for governor of Virginia, and he’s from that bastion of the Old South, Duluth. Minnesota. They used to call his kind carpetbaggers.

So my entry for today is not strictly a poem, but it is intertwined with the legacy that Stewart and his ilk are so fixated on honoring and preserving: slavery. (And its modern-day manifestation: racism.) Using the term Jacob’s ladder to refer to the connection between heaven and earth goes back to…Jacob, in the Bible. Jacob dreamt of a ladder that went all the way to heaven, with angels and everything. In Christianity, Jacob’s ladder is a metaphor for Christ, who bridges humanity and the godhead.

The spiritual “Jacob’s Ladder” dates to at least 1825, and was sung by slaves, who for generations could only dream of an escape from bondage. It’s in the form of call and response, which is useful for participation by unlettered congregations, as well as for ad libbing new sentiments. Truly—as the spirit moves you, you bring your brothers and sisters along.

American race-based human chattel slavery began right here in the Old Dominion in 1619. When the Lost Causers these days wave the Confederate flag around and bellow “states’ rights”, keep in mind that the “right” they were concerned about 160 years ago was the one to extend slavery into the new territories and thus maintain political power in Congress. Consider all those rebel armies the 1860s version of lobbyists, if you like. Southerners were afraid that if new states were admitted to the Union as free states, they’d be outvoted in Congress, as indeed they would be. So it was all about power—keeping it, and wielding it over other humans based on skin color.

For nearly 250 years, until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in 1865, slaves sang “Jacob’s Ladder” as an expression of faith and hope, and to draw the kind of strength it takes to persevere for that length of time. It’s served that purpose ever since, through Reconstruction, through the KKK, through the Depression, through the Civil Rights movement… And it still has value now, in the Gauleiter era.

One of my favorite versions is the one by Sweet Honey in the Rock that was used in Ken Burns’ seminal documentary The Civil War more than 25 years ago. 

So no “poet” today; perhaps not even a poem. But, as resistance goes, this is it, baby.

Resistance moon: Picking the scabs off your heart

For Anne Sexton, poetry was part of a course of therapeutic treatment for depression and other mental health issues. She suffered her first breakdown after the birth of her first daughter in 1954, and then again after her second daughter’s birth. It was so difficult for her to enroll in a writing class that she had a friend make the phone call to register, and go with her to the first session. But poetry turned out to be one of her strongest connections to life.

Even so, that connection was not strong enough. In 1974, aged 45, she drank a slug of vodka and then committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Sexton wrote about what we might think of as the “small” things—the ordinariness of everyday life. No Big Themes—unless the quiet courage to make a choice every day to continue with life can be considered Big. In fact, in “Courage”, she talks about that quality in various forms at varying stages of life.

For those of us who are finding ways large and small to resist the Kleptocrat and other authoritarian regimes, this is a good one to carry with us.

“Courage”

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love

as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

Resistance moon: Defy us to our worst

Yikes—we’re in the last week of National Poetry Month, and there’s been nothing from Shakespeare! However did that happen?

Okay, well, here’s the thing about Shakespeare: all his plays about Big Men (Legends-in-Their-Own-Minds Bigly Men) end badly for the eponymous heroes. Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Lear, Othello, Richard III (and probably I and II, too; I haven’t looked)—these guys all disappear up their own tailpipes and do not die of old age. 

(Well, Lear. Technically he was an old man. But turned out by his daughters to wander the moors with his Fool, descending into madness, his one loyal daughter executed...he drops dead in Act V. Not what he had planned, so I think my point stands.)

One who does come out well (right up until Act V, Scene 2) is Henry V, who progressed from the Prince Hal on a permanent Gap Year in Henry IV, Part I, through the maturing heir to the throne of Henry IV, Part II, until we see the inspiring commander and king who breaks France at Agincourt.

We all know his speech to the troops on Saint Crispin’s Day, and we mostly know the one at Harfleur (“Once more into the breach, dear friends”—Act III, Scene 1). But I think that the speech he delivers to the governor of Harfleur two scenes later, after that initial assault is more in tune with our resistance month. Here, Henry feels deeply how much the burghers of Harfleur have already cost his army, and he’s disinclined to treat with them—they can surrender, or they can suffer utter destruction. It’s kind of the approach U.S. Grant took in another war.

I dunno—for some reason this just speaks to me.

Henry V, Act III, Scene 3

How yet resolves the governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;
Or like to men proud of destruction
Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?
What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?