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The Novel Coronavirus differs from the Poetry Coronavirus since where the latter is concerned its victims always knew they’d get it. If this isn’t precisely funny it’s nevertheless true. Poets in every age have believed the world is ending which is why Shelley’s famous dictum that poets are the legislators of mankind is both terrifying and piffle.

I’ve always preferred poets who don’t sell tonic. You’ll rightly ask “who cares what I think?” As a poet I’ve no idea who might give a damn about what I say. But I’m not selling end times or elixirs.

Nor am I complaining online about canceled readings. If I see one more Twitter or Facebook post about poetry events being canceled and by gosh what a shame, I was so ready to read from my new slim volume of verse, etc., I will probably start to accost said poets who seem to have no grander concerns.

Most of the legislators of mankind are the same folks you meet at academic poetry conferences, every one of them dressed to convey intense relevance and marketability, the kind of people who would step on your hands to get ahead of you for a job or fellowship.
I once tripped on a carpet at a famous writing conference and fell down. My guide dog stood beside me. As I struggled to get back on my feet people actually walked over me. They were rushing to a panel on poetry and empathy.

There are no end times. There’s only community. How we care for it is the mark of our legislation.

—

Querying types ask me, “have” asked, and over the course of my forty year adult life, why is it the United States can’t embrace a Scandinavian styled social democratic approach to its economy. Presumably my American Finnishness makes me an expert. As a poet I am of course an expert on nothing and though my father was a political scientist I inherited only his curiosity.

The answer as I see it is that American socialism tends toward a fulsome admiration of Eugene Debs whose brand of anti-capitalist rhetoric is compelling if you have nothing. Bernie Sanders is an adept of Debs and as he rails against corporations he imagines investments and payrolls and pensions can be paratactically separated from the financial interest of the country. No one in Finland believes this and that’s the difference. You want industry, the banks, the vast nexus of private sector businesses to be at the table to support social life and the national interest. Insert opinion: I’ve never believed Sanders is capable of understanding this.

No one in Finland runs on a ticket blaming the establishment. Which brings me back to my point, that American socialism is more of Debs than F.D.R.. Here’s classic Debs: “Privately owned industry and production for individual profit are no longer compatible with social progress and have ceased to work out to humane and civilized ends.” Again, hardly anyone in Scandinavia believes this. Instead they believe in a laissez faire economy that’s regulated, supports the welfare state, and allows for profits and liquidity. You won’t hear this much from Bernie who often sounds like a “econ” professor at a second rate college.

Do we need Scandinavian styled social democracy in the US? Yes. If you could put Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt’s ideas together in a coherent platform you might get it.

First, a little toke of David Hume: “Epicurus’s old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?”

If God is a procrastinator one is then in mind of Benjamin Franklin: “You may delay, but time will not.” Hence God is not in charge of time.

Another drag of Hume: “The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”

**
Lately there’s a lot of talk about people most at risk, what with the Coronavirus. They’re the same people the neoliberal estate finds most inadmissible. The infirm, elderly and sailed have no value. Hitler said the disabled were “useless eaters.” On top of everything else we have a compassion drought.

**

Pass the Hume: “When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities.”

I was in mind of this while watching Donald Trump yesterday.

Comparisons between Trump and Nero are now popular. But Trump is essentially Ubu Roi.

**

God is cutting his nails with a flint, as always.

I haven’t been writing. Instead I’ve been traveling, most recently to Sarasota, Florida where I gave some talks in honor of the Americans with Disabilities Act which will turn 30 this summer. My guide dog “Caitlyn” made lots of friends. I made lots of friends. But writing didn’t happen. Instead I worried and woke early in my hotel and let the tidal dread of the twenty first century wash over me. As the late, great poet James Tate once put it: “And the Cokes were far far away.”

There was nothing to do but lie there and fear the Coronavirus, grieve for caged children, weep for our dying planet, fear gun nuts, sorrow for Elizabeth Warren, feel the bug eyed astonishment of life in an un-American time when “no can do” has replaced our nation’s ethos of getting things done. This is the age of lead. See Flint, Michigan.

Eventually one gets up. If you’ve a guide dog you have to. You feed her, take her outside. Drift through the hotel lobby with its canned music—a string version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” a song that survives but which, given its anarchist lyrics, the majority of Americans can’t possibly agree with. But they’ll hum along. Americans will hum along with anything.

This week I’m scheduled to fly to New York City. I’m going to keep traveling until I’m told not to by Andrew Cuomo or the ghost of Banquo.

So where’s the confession? Like you I suspect yes yes I’m fighting to believe in “can do” which means, well everything noble.

I’ve had many thrust:
Blind, disabled, angry—
Please, a silver toothpick,
The banquet is ended.

Soon we’ll be taking dark roads home.

I am a blind star gazer. Sometimes, looking up I see lights. Sometimes I think I’m imagining them. In any case, this is the condition of the first people on earth.

I take this feeling with me into the house. Clutching a spoon I’m the first spoon man. Yes I made it at home with a private forge.

Don’t you know there are wonders in the ordinary room?

Sure. Tell me to go to hell. You’ve got big things on your mind.

Here I am with my Sanskrit dust mote eyes and imaginary stars.

It used to be otherwise:
On the moon I was
A collector of sticks
For I was always blind
Probing and tapping
But here
Where splint and spleen
Are unknown
A red electrolysis
Of dust is the best teacher
And songs
Are a spirit force.

The politics of the personal matters. In the disability communities we say “nothing about us without us” and for good reason—the disabled are often left out of critical discussions about our needs. If you’re black and disabled you’re left out of multiple conversations. The politics of the personal is a matter of life and death. If you’re an indigenous American and disabled you can count on horrific health care and a reduced life expectancy. It matters who we are. Lives are in the balance.

Two weeks ago I critiqued a joke on Twitter that I thought was ablest because it made exercise into a white thing, and a comically compulsive thing. All I could think of was just how many veterans with PTSD, women who’ve experienced sexual violence, people with serious depression and other mental health issues—just how many of them are running for their lives. Are white people in spandex funny? Yes. But the sub-text of the joke was problematic beyond race.

The disabled no matter their ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation are ten times more likely to die early from lack of access to health and wellness programs. I was instantly targeted as a racist for daring to suggest the joke was problematic. This is the ugly side of identity politics—a severe, unscrupulous cry that no one outside your identity club should have the right to critique something downright ugly. We’re now seeing this with the horrific Snoop Dog attacks on Gayle King—she did her job as a journalist bringing up the scandal in Kobe Bryant’s life. She’s now facing death threats. I call it the new Stalinism and it is a tool in every identity camp. The sub-narrative is “don’t mess with my identity. I’m perfect. You’re inconvenient, or worse.” On Twitter people called for me to be “collected” which from a disability perspective is vicious. The disabled have always been collected, sequestered, imprisoned, experimented upon, and yes, killed outright. That’s how bad the current climate is.

Racism is deep and wide in America. I’m a blind white person. I’ve had my share of white privilege. I was the son of a college president and went to college for free. I’ve been able to secure loans, buy a car for my wife, get health care for my children. These should be rights for everyone. I’ve spent my life saying so. But being blind also means not being allowed into restaurants with my guide dog, being denied access to the materials and materiality of inclusion in a hundred settings. I’ve been told by professors that I didn’t belong in their classes because of my blindness. Is it wrong for me to say that my white privilege is hardly a comfort zone? Is it wrong to say that ableist humor can undermine efforts to secure life affirming health options for the vulnerable? That’s how bad the current climate is. One shouldn’t have to ask.

“When there’s a person, there’s a problem. When there’s no person, there’s no problem.”

Josef Stalin

You can’t go home again. Home is where they have to take you in. Home is sentimental. Home is where they stab you in the bath. It’s where you make the best of it.

“Home’s where you go when you run out of homes.” (John Le Carre)

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” (James Baldwin)

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” (Maya Angelou)

“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.” (Margaret Atwood)

“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.” (Wallace Stegner)

Here: this morning I think of the globalization of homelessness.

“We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again.” (Edwidge Danticat)

As a disabled person I think of home as receptivity. Home can be public or private so long as it lets me and people like me in.

Refugees with disabilities are being turned away across the globe. The current American president has made immigration a dynamic of health. Do I smell eugenics?

As the Nazis used to say, the disabled are useless eaters.

The homeless are bound up in the rhetorics of uselessness.