To A Soulless White College Student

This poem is based on several years of experience living with impressionable young college kids at an American University, seeing their indoctrination first hand. Also knowing two comparative literature students, who thought they had reached the greatest heights of intellectualism, and who looked down with contempt on everyone who had not followed them to the farthest reaches of theoretical extrapolation. The main metaphor is that whoever cannot construct their own ideology, yet functions intellectually, is somehow harnessed or enslaved to another ideology, which they follow unquestioningly, like an Ox yoked to a cart, who is whipped by his master (the founder of the ideology).

Of course, after so many hours of mind-numbing ennui from feminism, critical theory, anti-racism, cultural Marxism, Medieval History (with Islamic influence emphasized exactly as much as Carolingian), and the rest, I was tempted to imagine what it would be like to control all these people’s brains in the same way Freud, Derrida, Ehrenreich, Boas, Gould, Fromm, and their intellectual offspring control them. The American University scene is amazing actually, and priceless, for showing to what lows intellectualism can fall. What would I do if I had 10,000,000 young impressionable brains at my disposal, and billions of dollars to indoctrinate them with? I would do something better than making them read Barbara Ehrenreich and To Kill A Mockingbird!!

Your cavernous look betrays your craft
For taking passive part in the misbegotten adventures
Of the two-faced taskmasters who have ridden you all these years.

Have you made a noble stand in favor
Of those borrowed ideas, which even for your forebears were a foolish dream
In the hands of your new imported thought-merchants, a whip to beat you with?

How many times were you there
When they took the works of raw, masculine power
And tizzled them with a whisker of hypothetical dissection
Teased them with a theoretical blade of grass
Picked from the teeth of a Shtetl deconstructionist,
Working with their fabricated matrices
Maligned once more the noncomformity of everything noble?
Until the smartest of you, bound to some conceptual framework
Imagined they had worked a miracle
And that the glory of old days came spilling out like the bowels of an impaled gladiator
Revealing they had swallowed not Gold, but dross—

You were standing by
As the man of mysterious origins decried
The manifest worthlessness of our chauvinist past.
Ready with the meaningless nod of the head,
A part you’ve been waiting your whole life to play
Since the television first decided to teach you right from wrong.
Oh, had my forebears but forebore to be so evil!
Had we but the chance to take our old sins back!
Had only my people been harmless throughout history,
Collecting interest and reading the Tanakh!

You are yet an unknown variable, Thought-prisoner
Though you stand with a puffed chest and declare
Your unswerving dedication to the causes of the Day;
When time comes, your back against the wall,
You’ll see strange visions, dream strange dreams-
The brain’s chemistry no longer to be controlled
It’s quiet calculations can become… quite extreme.

And that will be the test of you, as I see it
If in fact you do resign your life, when you are asked
Because that this callow Waif of a man you worship
Will one day demand it, doubtless stands.
You and the vegetative masses with which you are Legion
Trapped in his soft exterior, find not the ruthless core:
Like a child whose lost his sweet, when Janus shows his other face,
You’ll weep and wonder where’s your sunshine gone.

Years before the day, better men than you
Seeing afar off these clouds gathering
Sit in council pondering with what frequency
Your worthless sister sold her soul for a puff of dust.

If I could do one thing for you, Prisoner,
I would pull you up with me as high as we could go
I’d show you the stars, I’d show you how they spin
I’d teach you happily the History of the World.
We could laugh and see how light we danced
With this or that silly bit of nonsense;
Return to our lives invigorated, refreshed—
Wearing solemnious wisdom like a robe of State:
Our smiling souls concealing Gold we ate.

But I find often enough your leaden feet impede
Heavenly journeys of each and every sort
And so this kind of thing is not what I intend
I would rather yoke you to my oxen-cart:
With your face in the furrow, my whip in my hand
I want to build a future fit for a Man.
That’s why I learned to philosophize, so that years after
I could still whisper in the ears of your masters.

Some gulf separates us, perhaps of birth-
But not like the man who you now serve,
I am not alien to you, am not fully removed,
I regard us two as comparable men.
Whatever you think, you recognize not
The subtle dissonance that registers in your thoughts
When you hear the stranger’s voice commanding you-
And though you realize what you have to do,
Your primordial soul still tells you something lacks…

Follow me, and when you look up
Behold smiling down, the reflection of a kindred face:
A man with no tribal animus against yourself,
Advising from within, a house without secret chambers.
Listen what I have to say, and leave behind forever
The piss-poor ideals that lead you astray:
Your slavery to the moralist’ quill feather,
The reasons you were given not to be a man.

Posted by Potential Frolic on Sunday, February 18, 2007 at 09:12 AM in
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