“To warn against, prepare for, and persevere until.”
Art, culture, information, and ideas for a free, tolerant, and democratic people.
*Samizdat, a Russian term dating from about 1966, means “self-published” and refers to the underground publication and circulation of banned, unauthorized, and dissident articles or books, often by hand and passed from reader to reader. Samizdat publication occurred across the Soviet Bloc. Its manual reproduction was necessitated by government control over the registration and permissions to access both typewriters and printing devices. Samizdat smuggled out of the country to lands supporting a free press became known as tamizdat.
USA YEAR ZERO
Last week I began teaching a four-week introduction to poetry class, four weeks of four-day-a-week multi-hour instruction intended to cram a full semester of learning into a summer month. I’ve taught the class in one form or another for years. I look to provide students with as sweeping a vision of the breadth of poetic expression, form, and some history as I can.
One theme of the first week was distinguishing the poem as art object (“so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow”) from poetry that offers more concrete cultural expression and representation. Very much by chance in its timing, among the examples we read is “The Eisenhower Years,” by Paul Zimmer. Over his many decades as a poet, Zimmer has developed a more than occasional eponymous literary persona in his poetry named “Zimmer,” as in “Zimmer, the Drugstore Cowboy,” where we learn that the unfortunate newborn was “stunned by a concrete tit at birth, / Dull as a penny bouncing off a cinder block.”
The Zimmer persona also appears in “The Eisenhower Years,” a poem that serves me well for teaching, beginning with the title, which offers no explicit reference to the body of the poem, so instruction begins at the top. Few of the students even know who Eisenhower was. (It was about a decade ago that I learned for the first time, teaching Adrienne Rich’s “Living in Sin,” that not a single student in the class was familiar with that expression.) Students begin, then, as a blank slate in recognizing the poetry’s historical and cultural context.
In the poem, the young Zimmer is flunked out of school and working at his father's shoe store for women. Arriving home after work, he goes through various rituals before his night out on the town drinking.
Home from work he checks the mail For greetings from his draft board. After supper he listens to Brubeck Lays out with a tumbler of Thunderbird, Cigarettes, and From Here to Eternity.
This is my sample stanza for demonstrating the need for research about a poem only decades old – about this poem, which the students are right now writing about. The students know few of these cultural references – sometimes, none of the students what a draft is. They don’t know Thunderbird but can guess, generally. They don’t know Brubeck or From Here to Eternity. I explain the draft, including the peace-time draft of the 50s and the inequities of the 60s draft during the Vietnam era. I tell them Brubeck was a jazz musician, Thunderbird a cheap fortified wine, and From Here to Eternity a very popular and award-winning novel set during World War II and adapted into a successful film.
The students feel reasonably enlightened by this information. Ah, but we’re not done, I say. There are more layers here. There is more to understand. We can dig deeper. Dave Brubeck was a great jazz musician, an exemplar of the cool jazz style. He was also white, in a musical form born of African American culture and dominated, especially in those years, by Black jazz musicians. The representative jazz musician Zimmer listens to might reasonably have been Miles Davis instead. But it wasn’t. Can we make something of that?
Thunderbird was a cheap wine commonly consumed by young people with little money and aggressively marketed by Gallo Wines to the indigent populations on the nation’s skid rows. From Here to Eternity was not just a novel about World War II but rather a novel that takes place during a halcyon pre-war period in Hawaii just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Eisenhower years, too, were perceived by many to be a halcyon period, a cultural high point of American prosperity and achievement, which was followed by more than a decade of divisive social unrest with roots reaching back through the 50s and before.
The poem ends, speaking of Zimmer, leaning against a lamppost,
All of complacent America Spreads around him in the night Nothing is moving in this void, Only the feet of old women, Twitching and shuffling in pain. Zimmer sighs and takes a drag, Exhales through his nostrils. He knows nothing and feels little. He has never been anywhere And fears where he is going.
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We cannot be complacent about what is at stake, which is everything. There is no Constitutional, institutional, or traditional bulwark, no compact in the blood of 1776, the Civil War, or World War II that will save American democracy. They all have failed, breached one by one for nine years. None but one: this coming presidential election. And even then, in victory, we will need to protect its outcome. In defeat, it will be a different year zero.
American Samizdat is a my new Substack publication, in addition to Homo Vitruvius. Though I have endeavored, with a few exceptions, to separate Homo Vitruvius from any political writing — which is only one reason I establish a separate publication — what is political in nature is not truly separate from the ideas and values that Homo Vitruvius promotes. Still, I seek the distinctive division, not to argue the particulars of this policy or that but rather the virtue, as Aristotle would conceive it, of political or social man — person, as we would rightly put it today. And there is that special mission in the paragraph above and declared at the top: to warn against the corrupt and callous authoritarian forces arrayed against American democracy, prepare for the possibility of their victory, and persevere until the oppression those forces will impose can be overcome. The lessons of history demonstrate clearly that once American democracy is lost, it will not easily, if ever, be regained. The independent and open mind, free to range among the heavens of the universe and of the universal mind, as lived in each embodied self — that is the dream and promise of the Renaissance and of the Enlightenment and the world of Homo Vitruvius. For Leonardo, it was homo ad circulum, homo ad quadratum: man to the circle, man to the square.
Let me pretend already the poem must be hidden in a paper cup. To read what’s written is to drink.
From American Samizdat, by Jehanne Dubrow: https://www.diodeeditions.com/product-page/american-samizdat
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I support this project wholeheartedly.
An anecdote: in late 2015 I was invited by a friend to a small dinner where the guest of honor was David Petraeus, the former general and CIA director who had been forced to resign for sharing classified information with a woman who was writing his biography and with whom he was having an affair.
Petraeus, whatever one's views of his service, had a great deal of experience dealing with presidents at a close and high level. We were maybe ten people and toward the end of the evening, we each had an opportunity to ask Petraeus a question.
Mine was about nominee Trump. I said, "At young children's birthday parties at bowling alleys, bumpers are used to protect the gutters so that the balls don't land in the alleys and instead make their ways to the pins. If Trump is elected, who will serve as the bumpers to protect the country."
Petraeus thought for a moment and replied, "Trump's not going to be elected."
That was a scary answer that I've not forgotten.
Congratulations Jay! I totally understand the intention behind crewing a separate newsletter for political content. I look forward to reading. I tend to avert my eyes... The only news coverage I have consumed is Jon Stewart's post debate commentary and that was only last night. Not sure what that says about me... But I refuse to consume mainstream media for better or worse.