The Best American Poetry

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: Everybody's Irish And Individual

Here’s a drink I would never order: an Everybody’s Irish. It calls for despoiling Irish whiskey with green Chartreuse, green crème de menthe, and an olive. Ugh. There are any number of reasons to shun this drink. It tastes awful. The name incites me to resentment. Everybody’s not Irish, and three of the four ingredients in the drink aren’t either, though they are green, which is the only reason they are in the drink. I resent that color, not taste, should determine what goes into a cocktail. Moreover,  if you go to Ireland and actually look at it, you quickly realize its dominant hue is emerald gray. Thus the relentless, tired equation of Irishness with bright green is not only a cliché but a lie. I resent the attempt to cash in on the supposedly universal appeal of those wonderful, whacky Celts regaling us with their charming whiskey-drinking ways right out of the pages of Angela’s Ashes. Oh, wait, that book was about abject misery. Whatever. People with last names like mine were raised on sentimentality about The Old Sod. It’s hogwash, of course, but “Everybody’s Irish” not only tells an objectionable lie—that the Irish are fun drunks and people want to be like them—it tells the lie flimsily. It tells a Made in China lie, oversimplified and oddly threatening, with its conformist absolutism. “Everybody’s Irish” should be a curse, not a cocktail. As rhetoric, it resonates with the “You’re all individuals!” bit in Life of Brian.  CROWD: “Yes! We’re all individuals!” INDIVIDUAL: “I’m not..”

In David Foster Wallace’s excellent essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” he notices that sometime in the 1980s, advertising had shifted away from the appeal of belonging to a group (drink this soda and you can join these happy people) to the appeal of avoiding a group (drink this soda and you’ll stand out from the dull. gray herd). The group became the villain. Everybody’s not Irish. Wallace points out a commercial motive behind this. Salespeople know the lone customer is an easier mark than one who shows up with friends, family or clan in tow. It makes sense for companies to vilify company, in the hope that you’ll go shopping by yourself. But Wallace also rattles off any number of larger sociological explanations for this, including the rise of the political right in the US.

If you think about one group in particular, what we call government, the right is definitely Vilifier in Chief. It makes perfect sense for a party proclaiming itself on the side of the individual. Republicans have been systematic in redefining government as a villain—Big Government, it’s called, never “good government,” and rarely just “government.” Other collective nouns in the right’s diction also get pejorative adjectives: The biased media. The liberal Elite. One-size-fits-all education. Singular words, words for people in groups of one, meanwhile, are mated with other positive words—personal freedom, faith-based initiative, individual liberty.

Why, then, are the freedom-loving folks on the political right so conformist? “We’re all individuals,” they cry in unison, and no one over there ever pipes up, “I’m not.” Of course, Republicans don’t describe themselves as conformist. They are “disciplined,” they are “principled,” they are “sensible.”  It’s the left that uses words like “lockstep” to describe the monolithic voting history of the 242 Republicans in the House and 47 in the Senate. Facts support the left’s conformity theory: witness the record-breaking number of filibusters in the Senate back when Republicans had only 39 or 40 Senators. So do GOP practices like litmus tests on abortion, no-tax pledges, and threats of denying leadership positions, which got Olympia Snowe and Chuck Grassley back in line when they showed the rare independence of mind to consider working with Democrats. What’s next in stifling dissent? Reeducation through labor?

I would point out here several disturbing things: First, the GOP, for all its professions of freedom-loving individualism, behaves like a totalitarian regime. Secondly, in a functioning democracy, government is supposed to be the locus where we act out our collective will, but for the right, the political party is the collective locus, not the government as a whole. And third, Democrats are in the majority, so to thwart them at every turn is to thwart the voters who put them there, which in turn is to thwart the fundamental principle of democracy, which is that the majority rules, not an ideologically pure cabal of insiders who think they know better than the voters. Hence blocking the routine business of raising the debt ceiling. “But this is the only leverage we have,” says the minority, forgetting the obvious alternative, that Republicans try standing for ideas and policies that are popular with voters. (BTW, the ones who won in the 2010 mid-term elections, where “The American people have spoken,” did it with 40% of voters participating, hardly the stuff of a representative democracy, and with nearly half of that 40% voting against the winners. Amend that statement to “Two out of ten American people have spoken.”) I have little hope that Republicans will try my small-d democratic suggestion that they be more appealing to voters. It takes too long and would involve what is anathema to The Party: loosening up on the rigid ideology.

What these three trends suggest to me is that the right seeks power, not individual liberty, and certainly not democracy. When they don’t have power, they are willing to trample on principles—including their own—to get it back. 

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: Tastes Like Capitulation

Sitting in a bar with a guy’s guy, a man so manly he not only writes crime novels, but also solves actual crimes, I lost control of the debate and joined him in ordering a Sambuca. To illustrate how far from sophistication I’d slid,Sambuca does not rate an entry in Alexis Lichene’s Encyclopedia of Wine and Spirits. Ouzo gets an entry. Pernod. Pastis. Absinthe. But not Sambuca, refuge of ex-cops and the Common Man, especially the Italian-American, went-to-community-college, Tea Party version of the Common Man.

Sambuca is an angry liquor. If you don’t believe me, set it on fire. Watch it burn. Let the whole goddam Federal budget go down in flames. See if I care.

Well, I do care, but as I mentioned, I lost control of the debate. Sometimes Sambuca comes to your table flaring up against government interference and high taxes. A licorice-based apertif like pastis might have noted that from 1932 to 1986 the tax rate on rich people never dipped below 50%, while now it is 35%, pretty low by historical standards. Only taxes on poor people  have plateaued at a higher level—10%—than in 1932, when a person earning $2,000 would owe 4% of his wealth to the guvmint. Samuca, flavored with star anis (so close to anus!), could care less about such pointy-headed facts and figures.

Other times, like this one with the ex-cop, Sambuca arrives in a calmer mood, with its three little coffee beans floating in clear resolve to take back our country, take it way back, back to the late 19^th century, when violent boom-and-bust cycles were a commonplace of a deregulated market, the gap between rich and poor yawned, and a cabal of super-wealthy industrialists had the politicians in their pockets. Sound familiar? Never mind, says Sambuca. And never mind that the 1890s kicked off the Progressive Era, named for the pinko policies that came out of such extremes—child labor laws, women’s right to vote, restrictions on how much arsenic manufacturers could put in wallpaper. (Seriously, arsenic gave wallpaper a vivid green tint you could admire until you got poisoned and died.) Never mind. Obama’s a socialist and let’s get rid of the EPA, Department of Education and collective bargaining, which fought for the pension check that Mr. Sambuca used to paid for his drink.

Sambuca’s inability or refusal to grasp complexity is born out by what happens when you add a splash of water. It becomes cloudy, confused, opaque. So do Pernod, pastis, ouzo and absinthe, all of which are frequently taken with water as a matter of taste. In the writing program where I teach, we value such complexity, but because Sambuca hates the taste of compromise and never reaches across the aisle, its tendency to cloud up when assimilated with other substances is so little known it’s practically classified. Also a state secret is why Sambuca is served with those three beans. One conspiracy theory contends that the beans represent health, happiness and prosperity, three qualities that were not widely shared in the 1890s.

 The Sambuca arrived. We raised our snifters to health, happiness and prosperity. He tasted uncompromising principles of small government and individual liberty to fire the union organizers in the arsenic factory, replacing them with 11 year olds. I tasted capitulation. 

Love Letter Fingered in French for my Guests

Molly is barely under her own dress today.  The teeth in her mouth biting air, the teeth in her zipper biting hair.  Twisted tired.  Too much time in the tub tonight. Maybe it was that small thimble of gin (and then agin)  Je besoined just a petit puddle to dit what je need to ecrite in mon lettre pour mon hot piment.  Pour.  Poor you.

 

Mon coco, my chou,

Today, our neighbor left a cake (de beurre) on the doorstep.  In the rain.

Stoop, troops.  Seal six, steal sex.  It’s ashes, asses, all fall down.  Fingery mess.  Ring me round the rosey, something about a candlestick, a baker, my butcher’s a maker.  I’ve never pulled out a plum .  Confections, confessions.  I ate wet cake.

Nous avons le beurre et l'argent du beurre,

M.

 

You win if. . .

You win if you can name the bandleader with the clarinet and the singer
and what is it that you win? How about this:

 
Have you ever tried a Ramos Gin Fizz with Creme de Violette instead of orange blossom water?

An Epiphany of sorts. (by Tynan Davis)

Last night my parents and I went on a little cultural excursion here in Alexandria, LA: A family field trip to the drive-thru daquiri shacks!  That's right, folks!  Drive-thru booze.  There are 3 frozen watering holes close to home, so, like Melchoir, Balthazar and Kaspar, we followed yonder neon  signage, giggling all the  while, and singing verses of Good King Wencelas in honor of St. Stephen's Day.  (That's what the Magi did on the way, right??)  In honor of the approaching Epiphany, here's a re-write of We Three Kings accompanied by some photographic evidence of our silliness.  Please sing as you read! 

 

These 3 cups of daquiri are                                   
served to us whilst in a car.
Frosty Fact'ry, you attract me -
your sign like the Eastern Star.

 
Oh! Serve us mudslide. 
Serve us nog.
Serve us needed hair of the dog!
In the Bayou, you can drive-thru and
maintain your Yuletide fog.

 

If you're driving, follow the law.              
Keep the wrapper on the straw.
Our server Dalton, bears no fault when
we drink like it's Mardi Gras.

 

Oh! Serve us mudslide.
Serve us nog.
Serve us needed hair of the dog!
In the Bayou, you can drive-thru and
maintain your Yuletide fog.

 

Loooziana, I must profess -
You have mastered the art of excess.
Parties, gumbo, cracklins, you know...
you greet with unmatched noblesse.

 

Oh! Serve us mudslide.
Serve us nog. 
Serve us needed hair of the dog!
In the Bayou, you can drive-thru and
maintain your Yuletide fog. 

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender

Yes, it’s Oktoberfest, which means beer selections in a faux Gothic type so ornate you can’t read it, as if Germany had a corner on the Middle Ages. Okay, printing press and all that, but hello, Ariel Narrow, anyone?

That said, there’s some fine beers out there in Oktoberfest land—I just can’t get past the font to tell  you what they are. I had something that began with an H as I sat with my Libertarian friend (!!!) who works for a right-leaning think tank. My “H” beer (Haufbrauhaus? Hefeweizen? Hichbineinberliner?), according to the waiter, was “on the dark side,” and so was my date, but as it happens, he regaled me with stories of how open minded and curious Al Franken is. He’d spent some time at the Washington Press corps dinner with the guy and discovered that Al Franken is someone you’d enjoy having a Hefeweizen with, a non-ideologue who willingly explores the issues of the day with a wide range of people, including Libertarian People®, while still retaining a sense of humor. Would that my beer was with Al Franken, you’re thinking, except that my friend also turned out to be enjoyable to hausgab with, liked exploring the issues of the day without freezing into Tea Party rigidity, and had a sense of humor. The older he gets, he says, the less riled he becomes about the ideas that got him into politics.

He’d never, never win a primary in his own party, the ® GOP ® ®.

Meanwhile, back at a German joint in “Middle Long Island,” I’m wondering what a beer drinker is to do about that font and that 9.2% unemployment rate, as my waiter “Ryan” goes beyond solicitousness to outright ass-kissing and my Think Tank® friend moves on to discussing how he likes Obama, too, not the policies but the man himself, an intellectually curious guy not unlike Al Franken, a fellow Democrat—why is it the Democrats are so much more likeable?—and how no President could possibly be popular when unemployment is so high. This guy votes Republican®, though, and come Tuesday, he will negate my vote for progressive candidates at the local, state and national level with his vote for slash-and-burn candidates at the local, state and national level. Unlike  him, I’ve never met Al Franken, nor have I shaken hands with Barack Obama. I’ve never even chatted with my local congressman, Tim Bishop, and yet I’ve attended call parties for him and dragged my 9-year-old around the neighborhood with door knob hangers, explaining that this is how changes happen.

It’s not how change happens. My Right-Leaning® friend is the perfect swing voter, he ought to cross over from the dark side to support people he actually likes, and yet he won’t. My 9 year old can’t tip the balance, being ineligible to vote for the next decade. How do open, curious Republicans with senses of humor stand by their party?

When I sip a dark beer, I think of weight. Dark beers have a weight to them, a burden on their shoulders that says, “Batten down. Storm’s a-coming. Find people you like and hunker down with them in the nearest available cellar.” Unfortunately for my Libertarian® friend, the good company’s incorporated by Registered Democrats. Unfortunately for me, what Republicans want to do with their power will unleash a storm that’s non-partisan in its fury. When the dark side wins, it pours on everyone.

-- Julie Sheehan

The Ghost in the Martini

Anthony Hecht has a poem called "The Ghost in the Martini." Great title, no? John Cheever has a story in which the first taste of a perfectly chilled martini is the protagonist's best moment of the day.

Can anyone think of memorable martini poems or prose passages?

Photo credit: Ms. Maggie Wells

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender

Until its death by Anheuser-Busch in 2006, there was one and only one reason to order a Rolling Rock. You were slumming. Rolling Rock occupied that peculiar little niche, described in the linked article as “economizing drinkers, college students and, to a certain extent, hipsters who might be attracted to its painted-on labels, cool iconography, and the mildly mysterious number ‘33’ printed on every bottle,” happily for decades. While it passed as a working-class beer, at home in dive bars and the banged-up hands of plumbers and electricians, Rolling Rock was equally likely to be found in hands whose most strenuous act of late had been to pick up a volume of Heidegger. It was stinky beer for the upper-middle-class-bound, the group primarily interested in slumming.

Slumming has a fascinating history as a slang term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1839, it meant “passing bad money,” but by the 1880s, it had taken on its present-day denotation of visiting poor neighborhoods “esp. for charitable or philanthropic purposes.” I’m going to take issue with that part of the OED’s definition, the purpose. To begin with, the illustrative quotation right next to it, from 1884, reads, “I am not one of those who have taken to ‘slumming’ as an amusement,“ suggesting an entirely different and uncharitable purpose: doing it for fun. Slumming has always seemed on its surface to be connected to class consciousness, like the reform-minded muckraking journalism of the Late Victorian period exposing corruption in high places, or like ecotourism today, but those are essentially documentary endeavors, interested in fact-finding and, for all their ideological overlays, open to new information.

Slumming, on the other hand, seeks thrills, not social change, and gets there by exploiting the existing social order. It’s only amusing to visit a slum if you can leave. The second illustrative quotation in the OED is from 1894: “Slumming had not become the fashion at that time of day,” and that one, too, emphasizes the superficiality of the act. “Fashion,” not philanthropy, is the prime motive here, which makes perfect sense going back to slumming’s earliest incarnation as slang for counterfeiting. The slummer pretends to be poor, but isn’t really. Both quotations suggest slumming is a counterfeit of caring about the economic misfortunes of others, a pose more attuned to Decadence than altruism.

Rolling Rock had its own brush with counterfeiting when Anheuser-Busch closed down the only factory this dive-bar staple had ever known, in Latrobe, PA, moved it to New Jersey, and tried to re-brand it as a “craft” beer. Obviously, its parent company missed the whole point of Rolling Rock, which was to get away (temporarily, at least) from one’s own status as an artisan cheese eater who listens to R.E.M.

Now there’s no reason to order Rolling Rock, nor is there a reason to go slumming. To paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have met the slum, and it is us. Remember, the amusement value of slumming derives from the ability to leave. But those who ten or twenty years ago would have been upper-middle-class-bound are today not so sure about their financial destiny. Yeah, we’re in an economic recovery, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t believe it, nor does anybody else I speak with. My friends and neighbors want to be hopeful, but they express their optimism in quiet undertones that sound more like fear. This slump seems different, bigger, more serious, and deep, as in unfathomable. Only Washington and Wall Street , with the Dow again springing above 10,000, cling to the delusion that we’re on the road to recovery. The rest of us see an economic house of cards that makes the corrugated tin shacks fringing the Nairobi dump look better built.

We spend more than we earn. Our country consumes more than it produces. Our planet is one giant maxed-out credit card, and the time is coming when even a $4 Rolling Rock won’t fit on it. That’s neither amusing nor fashionable. We’ll all be making home brews then, our hands banged up from digging ourselves out of debt.

Au revoir, Rolling Rock. Hello, ’33.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender

Satire amazes me with its quickness on the uptake. No sooner had Arthurian legend started making the rounds than Marie de France began collecting these oral tales and making fun of them. Chaucer has the Knight’s tale, a Romance, and the Wife of Bath’s Tale, a parody of a romance, cheek by jowl in the same book. Sarah Palin and Tina Fey performed in near perfect synchronicity, as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley.

So what cocktail is the satire of a cocktail? I suppose the recipe would have to be the key—a skewed catalogue of mismatched ingredients. Catalogues are often sources of humor, sometimes without trying. Think of the annoyingly complete laying out of possibilities, grouped into sets and subsets of sets and subsets of subsets, that Aristotle did for rhetoric. (“So much for Kindness and Unkindness. Let us now consider Pity, asking ourselves what things excite pity, and for what persons, and in what states of our mind pity is felt.” p. 1396! As in, 1,395 previous pages of this stuff! Good grief!)

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender

Okay, Cosmo drinkers out there, maybe I was a little hard on you yesterday, with the hypocrisy comparison. I don’t want to get bonked on the head with a Kate Spade bag the next time I step out, so I’ve chosen to feature a cocktail nobody’s heard of, the Pain Killer.   It’s made with dark rum, pineapple juice, coconut cream, nutmeg and orange juice, which makes it a natural for drinkers who are underage, hung over, or hiding something under the cover of strong fruity tastes. The Pain Killer is as shocked as his parole officer to learn that, wow, there’s rum in this drink.

I propose that the pain being killed is the pain of discovery. Imagine how a banana feels, being peeled. Now imagine what happens if you peel a hypocrite, who offers a pretty juicy, irresistible, banana-like target. John Ensign, Eliot Spitzer, Roy Ashburn, these were media feeding frenzies for a reason. We love to watch hypocrisy get squeezed out of its sanctimonious rind, we have powerful urges to see it exposed, and every once in a while, we are gratified by a set of overwhelming facts, perhaps caught on video or confirmed by thousands, that comes along to slice right through that ignorant bliss. But unlike bananas, hypocrites don’t just sit there. They react, seeking to replace the discomfort of exposure with an artificial bliss induced by rum. Into this Pain Killer also go strained rationalizations, false apologies, and flat-out denial of the facts, no matter how glaring they are.

There is one other possibility: the honest confession. I call this the Papaya Smoothie response. It is rarer, but a lot healthier. It has no alcohol, for one thing, just lots of fruit with honey as a natural sweetener, and it is the consistency of cheerfulness.   If you’ve ever listened to public radio during a pledge drive, you might have noticed Ira Glass showing off his knack for finding people who cheerfully admit their hypocrisy after it is pointed out to them. This is no small thing. He gets people on the telephone who are rumored to listen to NPR without donating to it. He asks them if, indeed, the rumors are true. They groan or laugh and fess up. Then they write a check. Cheerfully.

I’m no Ira Glass, having never found anyone who is cheerful during the pointing out process. I mostly find Pain Killer types, especially ones who rationalize. For example, a dear friend used to merge into an already crowded highway during morning rush hour like this: he’d stay in the merge lane until the last possible moment, until he was practically driving sideways on the concrete barrier, then he’d insert his car ahead of all those other cars patiently waiting their turn. We call this behavior Budging in Line, and it dovetails with hypocrisy’s penchant for holding others to standards (or traffic laws) it has no intention of following. 

I discussed this driving behavior with my left-leaning force-for-good-in-the-world friend. What gives with the Budging? Does it not smack of thoughtlessly capitalistic, Me-First individualism? Apparently not, because he proceeded to deliver a dissertation on how his driving was serving the common good of the traffic—the only reason he cut in front of other cars was to do them a favor.

Our politicians are even less prone to cheerfulness when their hypocrisies are called out than my friend, but they’ve learned not to rationalize. Instead, they have press conferences, where they usually fail to apologize for being hypocrites, preferring to apologize for lesser and more flattering offenses: “mis-speaking” is popular, as is the offense of sticking to their principles when they should have caved in immediately to political expediency, or my favorite, just today, from oil industry cheerleader and Texas Republican Joe Barton, an apology for how other people misconstrued his deep sympathy and good heart in his earlier apology, which was to BP's Tony Hayward for "Obama's shakedown" of him. Barton went with “mis-speaking,” but credited it to someone else.

 Confused? At least we don’t have to contemplate any powerful religious institutions failing to face bald facts about the gap between what their members do with what they preach. Whew! They’re way too busy excommunicating a nun at a Phoenix hospital for saving a woman’s life to have sexually abused thousands of children they’ve suffered to come unto them. And even if one or two clergymen were pedophiles—not that any are, I’m just sayin’—we all know those poor, poor priests would be victims of “media frenzies” in a “secular" age.

Okay, enough of that icky scenario. Thank goodness it hasn’t come to pass, while the Pain Killer still edges itself onto coasters and bev naps the nation over. Much as I like a nice, fruity rum punch, I’m going to aspire to Papaya Smoothie. Call me, Ira. I’m ready.