Treasonous Clerks
Jan. 20th, 2003 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arisbeSome years ago I tuned in to public television and saw -- and heard -- a performance of Brahms' German Requiem in honor of the heroes of the German Resistance, hosted by Bill Moyers from the pulpit of Riverside Church, from which, as it happens, I once addressed a Teachers College Commencement Convocation. My thoughts turned from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Martin Luther King, whose holiday would be the next day, with the following result:
There, where I myself have stood,
President Johnson's P.R. man,
Still boyish after thirty years,
Reads out the executed pastor's words,
The would-be tyranocide's.
And he is moved and I am moved,
And so would my father be moved,
Nearer now than was when last alive:
This music is for him.
Woe to all of music's enemies
Who love the marching feet and broken glass.
Tomorrow, publicly, another preacher man
Is honored, though he could not keep his faith
With wife or countrymen or even race,
Imagining or pretending Stalin's spawn
Friendly to his folk, giving over
Asia to a sea of blood, making that
Treason a test of color loyalty,
Himself gunned down on motel balcony.
Even in this one, the music ran,
Though broken, almost shouted down at last.
He knew not what he did, and did as well
As many Germans faithful to their wives,
Misled his own, but spoke a saving word
To white men like my father, even me,
Though my untutored politics preferred
Episcopalian Arizona Jew,
Whom thirty years have vindicated now,
Depriving me of sinecure at last.
Bad as the times are, are they not for me
Better than the days of World War II,
Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Winston C.,
Mussolini, Franco and Salazar?
Not that I would not have survived, but that
I would, on one side or the other one,
Even have flourished. For times like our own
Give certainties enough to turn my head,
Without the sluttish History spreading wide
To swallow up such manhood as I have.
No better I than Martin Luther King,
Truckloads of German Christians, liberal Democrats:
At least I hear the music, getting faint.
Great Edmund saw this coming, long ago,
Afrothing out the lips of dead Rousseau,
And craved an unknown grave to hide his bones.
All natural ties are severed now, for love
Of abstract humankind and present rut,
And Christ condemned again, and any God
Worth worshipping rejected as absurd,
His image trampled in the dust, mere man
By more than man pretended left behind
An object of abuse, all decency
Deliberately besmeared in infant rage:
Such progress must I praise or keep my peace
To keep my job -- even so not for long,
Suspected of vestigial pieties
While government is poised to stop the checks.
Another pedagogue turned loose to make his way
By buying, selling, writing well or ill,
To speak the truth he finds, with tongue or pen
And take his stand amid the world of men.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2001 by F. P. Purcell; all rights reserved.
There, where I myself have stood,
President Johnson's P.R. man,
Still boyish after thirty years,
Reads out the executed pastor's words,
The would-be tyranocide's.
And he is moved and I am moved,
And so would my father be moved,
Nearer now than was when last alive:
This music is for him.
Woe to all of music's enemies
Who love the marching feet and broken glass.
Tomorrow, publicly, another preacher man
Is honored, though he could not keep his faith
With wife or countrymen or even race,
Imagining or pretending Stalin's spawn
Friendly to his folk, giving over
Asia to a sea of blood, making that
Treason a test of color loyalty,
Himself gunned down on motel balcony.
Even in this one, the music ran,
Though broken, almost shouted down at last.
He knew not what he did, and did as well
As many Germans faithful to their wives,
Misled his own, but spoke a saving word
To white men like my father, even me,
Though my untutored politics preferred
Episcopalian Arizona Jew,
Whom thirty years have vindicated now,
Depriving me of sinecure at last.
Bad as the times are, are they not for me
Better than the days of World War II,
Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Winston C.,
Mussolini, Franco and Salazar?
Not that I would not have survived, but that
I would, on one side or the other one,
Even have flourished. For times like our own
Give certainties enough to turn my head,
Without the sluttish History spreading wide
To swallow up such manhood as I have.
No better I than Martin Luther King,
Truckloads of German Christians, liberal Democrats:
At least I hear the music, getting faint.
Great Edmund saw this coming, long ago,
Afrothing out the lips of dead Rousseau,
And craved an unknown grave to hide his bones.
All natural ties are severed now, for love
Of abstract humankind and present rut,
And Christ condemned again, and any God
Worth worshipping rejected as absurd,
His image trampled in the dust, mere man
By more than man pretended left behind
An object of abuse, all decency
Deliberately besmeared in infant rage:
Such progress must I praise or keep my peace
To keep my job -- even so not for long,
Suspected of vestigial pieties
While government is poised to stop the checks.
Another pedagogue turned loose to make his way
By buying, selling, writing well or ill,
To speak the truth he finds, with tongue or pen
And take his stand amid the world of men.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2001 by F. P. Purcell; all rights reserved.