The Sunday Poem

The uses of political anger

Peterloo

I am not, by my nature, an angry man. I’m not even that partisan, in a political sense (but don’t try coming after my beloved Bears, Cubs, Bulls, and Blackhawks). When I was growing up in the 1970s, neighbors in America weren’t so angrily divided over politics, and I come from a big family where all kinds of opinions were debated at the dinner table (mostly) without rancor. As a journalist, I’ve tried hard to listen to every person I’ve encountered in my work with an open mind and an open heart, including the many supporters of Donald Trump whom I’ve talked with over the years—including, even, Trump himself, in my recent interview. My wife, Johanna, sometimes says I’m “frustratingly fair.”

But there is a time and a place for righteous anger in politics.

We live under an administration that is openly, gleefully trashing some of the foundational constitutional values and procedures of our country; that is using violence and the threat of violence not against dangerous criminals, but against many peaceful immigrants and even against the innocent, all to underline the threat of coercion to the whole people; and that is demolishing essential federal support and the opportunities that support opens for working families and individuals, all in order to stuff the pockets of the mega-rich.

Am I angry? You bet I’m angry. In the presence of such a danger to my country, I’m not “concerned” or “disturbed” or “troubled.” I’m angry.

A lot of people, good people, aren’t there yet. They may find such rhetoric over-heated, such an attitude hyperbolic. A word to them, then.

If you don’t believe that our country is in danger under this administration, you are one of three things:

1) You don’t want to admit it because it sounds too weird, and you don’t want to contemplate it because that’s too awful. Fair enough. Most of us, most of our lives, live on the sidelines of the great political debates and partisan struggles. We cultivate our own gardens, as Voltaire recognized. And that’s healthy. Who needs the hassle and the risk of engaging in political fights? Who’s got the time? And for most of your life (if you’re lucky for all of your life), that works just fine and is a perfectly decent way to spend your days.

2) Maybe you don’t want to say that our country is in danger, even though you see the same things I see and you understand the radical designs this administration has on our way of life. But you think that putting it that way and operating on that basis is ludicrously overwrought. It seems comical to you to say or think such a thing, and farcical to go out into public and act upon the idea. You are sure…almost sure…that our institutions will hold, and you are simply not the kind of person who freaks out over the news. This attitude seems to me to be more about convenience than conviction. You get it. But you don’t want to do anything about it.

3) And finally, if you reject altogether the very notion that our country is endangered by Trump and his administration, you’re part of the problem. You’re either MAGA, or a fellow traveler, along for the ride.

To the first group—the group that is the most important constituency in American politics, now and always—I say, it’s time. This is the moment in your life when you must decide who you are as a citizen. Look straight at what’s happening, open your eyes, and you will come to the same conclusion so many of us have. The Republic is in danger.

It sounds so ominous. And it is. But be not afraid. Do not fear that stark conclusion because this, this very moment, is your opportunity. You, we, all of us have been given a great gift, the gift of living in consequential times. If you stand up, and defend our beloved country now, you will be able to look your grandchildren in their eyes and tell them of these days, and they will tell their grandchildren what you did. You will make them proud. You will be a proud American.

So, get angry.

Which brings us, by a very roundabout way, to The Sunday Poem. It’s called “England in 1819,” and it’s by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. (Nobody reads Shelley any more, and with good reason. He could be a windbag. But not here.)

In this poem, Shelley is responding to the 1819 “Peterloo Massacre” in Manchester, a city that was already industrializing at that time, with all the attendant stresses and disruptions. On August 2nd of that year, a force of armed cavalry charged into a huge demonstration in St. Peter’s Field in the city. Tens of thousands of peaceful protesters were demanding the vote for all men, not just the wealthy, and calling for an end to the crippling tariffs of the Corn Laws, which had caused widespread hunger and unemployment.

The cavalry charged. At least ten protestors were killed. And Shelley, who was 27 and living in self-exile in Italy because of his radical beliefs, wrote this, one of the greatest expressions of political anger in English literature:

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,

But leechlike to their fainting country cling

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field;

An army, whom liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;

Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;

A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—

Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.