or, Nattering Nabobs and Elegiac Hillbillies
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, May 20, 2025 – When an ancient thing is removed from the free marketplace, and made subject to the administration of the Higher Ed. sector, as Poetry was during Nixon’s presidency, bad things are bound to happen.
As is clear today, even to people distracted by perpetually breaking news, America’s Higher Ed. sector is like the child of angry divorce. Custody is divided between warring parties who no longer speak, but only communicate through lawyers.
While still free in wild America, Poetry raised Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost to the first rank of the Immortals, while raising many more to great heights of literary achievement.
If America had aspired to nothing greater than to be a new England, then she wouldn’t have fought the Revolutionary War, which upset old England’s monarchical rule in America. Monarchy is based on inherited power, which is taken from the plenary power vested in people at birth.
There is no other rightful political power than whatever power the people openly and freely invest in various political offices. No person has any more power than the Constitution or Congress vests in various political offices. But, having freed ourselves from a real king, America has been seduced by a fake one.
People veto the divine right of kings
For a long time, monarchs pretended to have been personally selected by God, but people made a great leap forward after the invention of the printing press. They woke to the truth that God expects people to take care of each other, which means they must take sides in politics to elect honest, able leaders.
With A.I.’s reign just over the horizon, it is important that we emphasize that only Nature’s God vests political power in people at birth. Otherwise, Big Tech moguls may induce their politicians to issue visas and voting credentials to their robots, which even the distracted masses know are not natural beings endowed with inalienable human rights.
The only poetic phrase remembered from the reign of the obnoxious Nixon is “nattering nabobs of negativism,” which was uttered by his fellow felon in office, Spiro T. Agnew, aimed at the same enemy Trump has declared war on, the people’s representatives in the press.
To contemplate the nation as it fell, like a stone, from Nixon-Agnew to Trump-Vance, is to imagine the decline and fall of a place barely out of national adolescence. Good Ole Ike was an apolitical soldier used by corporate interests to terminate the twenty year rule of the party that solved the Great Depression and prosecuted the two world wars.
Ike’s old friend Alan Dulles oversaw CIA black-ops that begot monarchical rule in Iran, which begot the Iran hostage affair which ended the Carter presidency and begot Reagan who fired the air traffic controllers and ignored thousands of deaths before he would say the word AIDS. His republican successor has as many COVID deaths on his hands, which now glow with the gold of Islam.
For the price of a gilded jet, which represents less than a week’s profit to those sand-trapped oil monarchs, POTUS insults memories rooted not only in 9/11, but throughout the Arabian Gulf and the Middle East.
Vance is Agnew 2.0
Meanwhile the public is left to riffle the pages of Hillbilly Elegy, as if the odious Vance would answer how, what, when, where, and why did the American experiment in self-governance fail so miserably, so sadly?
Meanwhile, we haven’t heard a peep in protest from the huddle of professorial poets on campus. Perhaps the donning of academic regalia results in such a reverential hush that their pleas for justice are inaudible beyond the Ivory Tower? Or, maybe they only fear the loss of federal patronage?
While in the wild, Poetry worked by seducing poets to trade temporal comfort for the gold of immortal glory. So hobbled by political considerations, Academic Poetry can only establish such minimum standards as may be communicated and enforced via the terms of service of the tuition contract.
The establishment of minimum standards of compliance has the foreseeable consequence of obviating maximum standards of achievement. When the meanest, least literate of criminals is elevated to the highest office on earth, only Musk and the people of Qatar can expect to get their money’s worth.