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If You Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter

If solidified oil with chemical clutter
That helps it look yellow and tasty to eat
Makes you think there’s no need to believe it’s not butter,
You believe in modernity’s biggest deceit.

If you think things can just be replaced with a model
And the ghost of what’s good is on par with the best,
If chemical mixtures that go in a bottle
Can replace Mother’s milk and the warmth of her breast,

If changing appearance is all that is needed
To match the real thing if you only pretend,
If killing a game villain means you’ve succeeded
And a shadow of color onscreen is a friend,

If pretend’s just as good and you’re happy to settle
For text in a chat thread instead of a life,
If androids are people with hearts made of metal
And pixels of flesh are as good as a wife,

If any religion’s the same as another
And feelings and fiction are equal to fact,
If a pet parent’s just like a father or mother
And a fatherless family’s as good as intact,

If you still think this fake bubble life doesn’t make you
As homeless as beggars who sleep in the street,
If this insect-hive world of today doesn’t shake you,
You believe in modernity’s biggest deceit.

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Rhyming Maxims for Today, Part II

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I.
God destroyed the city Sodom
When their morals hit the bottom;
It’s beyond my understanding
Why the modern world’s still standing.

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II.
Because they can’t convince us that they’re right,
They try to blind our children to the light.

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III.
I ask when hearing of the woke:
“Is this real news, or just a joke?”

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IV.
We’d be more trusting toward the science
If you didn’t force compliance.

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V.
I’m afraid all our cultural signposts betoken
No shred of our natural morals intact
If the “silent majority” still hasn’t spoken
When children are having their genitals hacked.

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VI.
A partial list of things the leftist hates:
Religion, family, the United States.

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VII.
Do you really want your daughters
In locker rooms with gender squatters,
Like a senior they call Tiffy,
With lipstick, hair clips, and a stiffy?

.

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Joshua C. Frank found this uncredited poem in The Compleat Computer by Dennie L. Van Tassel, 1976: https://archive.org/details/TheCompleatComputer/page/n53/mode/2up

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“A Programmer’s Lament,” 1976

by Anonymous

I really hate this damned machine;
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want,
But only what I tell it.

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Joshua C. Frank works in the field of statistics and lives in the American Heartland.  His poetry has been published in Snakeskin, The Lyric, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, Atop the Cliffs, Our Day’s Encounter, The Creativity Webzine, Verse Virtual, and The Asahi Haikuist Network, and his short fiction has been published in Nanoism and The Creativity Webzine.

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21 Responses

  1. Joseph S. Salemi

    “Rhyming Maxims for Today” are real zingers! You know what makes them better than a lot of conservative polemical poetry that merely complains, squawks, and expresses outrage? Simply this: THEY HIT HARD, AND THEY EXPRESS DEEP CONTEMPT.

    Joshua isn’t trying to convert anybody. He just lashes out in sharp quatrains and couplets, and makes it quite clear that he hates the left, loathes them, and has zero respect for their intelligence. It’s this sort of cold savagery that gets under the enemy’s skin, and too many of us are too damned good-natured to do it. Maxim VII, giving an unabashed description of some transvestite freak with a “stiffy” in a girls’ bathroom, is EXACTLY what we need to write these days.

    The first poem about butter is just as effective. Keep this artillery barrage going, Joshua! Our job is to make the culture wars hotter and fiercer, by insulting and angering the enemy. Let’s send them screaming to their support groups.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you Joe! That you like these so much means a lot. You’ve described exactly how I think and feel about the left. I intend to keep these coming.

      I used to try to convert people, but even the successes were temporary; my poem “Ballad of the Video Game Hero” was based in part on this experience, as I stopped trying after realizing that people in our leftist culture aren’t simply ignorant, as I was in my unbelieving days; they actively don’t want to believe the truth.

      As you describe, I’m finding “cold savagery” to be more effective, and a lot more fun to boot!

      Reply
  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    We are living in a society of androids masquerading as people! They are flesh and bone but have crossed over in their minds to some infernal realm. Your “ifs” are vivid reminders of this devolution of humanity. Your rhyming maxims are like piercing arrows of sanity in world gone bonkers. The lament of the programmer was an apt early realization of the synthetic cyber world on the horizon in 1976.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Roy. I’m glad you like them. That’s a really good description of modern people: “androids masquerading as people.” I’ve also heard them called “bugmen” (because they live like drones in a hive).

      As a programmer myself, I can tell you that “A Programmer’s Lament” is accurate. To get the computer to do what you want, you have to define every little thing, even the smallest, most basic steps. That’s why I don’t believe science fiction’s claims of artificial intelligence someday being as sophisticated as a human brain.

      Reply
  3. C.B. Anderson

    Salemi is exactly right, Joshua. Your maxims, once again, are excellent. But I also noticed that, from the way you constructed “If You Can’t Believe…,” that each stanza could almost stand on its own as a mordant maxim, though the thread connecting all of them is as strong as a hawser. I am very glad that you have decided to bare to the world your short bites one more time. And I hope to do it more myself in the near future. I’m all for the maximization of maxims.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, C.B. I’m happy to hear this, since your Aphorisms and his comment on them were the inspiration for these maxims and the first set.

      Reply
  4. Margaret Coats

    Beginning “If You Can’t Believe” with butter gives the poem intriguing structure. Fake butter came into use early; many of us grew up with margarine on the table and Crisco near the stove. These are hardly modernity’s biggest deceit, but that last line of the first stanza entices the reader onward to find out what is. It’s not even “fake bubble life” (nice echo of “butter” in “bubble”), but the belief that fakery is equal to or better than reality. This is quite modern. The mixing of serious expressions with absurd examples works convincingly; that’s part of the poem’s persuasive quality. Human beings have substituted false goods for real ones since the Fall, but the trend is clearly accelerating–and delusions about it are becoming more acceptable. Fun and profound at the same time, Joshua.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Margaret. I’m glad the technique “works convincingly” and gives the poem its “persuasive quality.”

      Vegetable shortening may not be modernity’s biggest deceit in and of itself, but the mentality behind coloring it yellow and calling the difference between this and butter irrelevant is the same as the mentality as giving a man female hormones, electrically ripping out his facial and body hair, giving him all kinds of plastic surgery, and finally mutilating his genitals into an always-open wound, and then insisting he is just as much a woman as a real woman. There is a direct line between the one and the other.

      Reply
  5. Brian A. Yapko

    Josh, the poetry is beautifully crafted and offers a harsh slap to the face of modern faux (foe?) culture. “If You Can’t Believe…” is, I believe, a reference to the old margarine product and its annoying commercials. There was also a product called “I Can’t Believe It’s a Girdle” which also had annoying commercials (are there any other kind?) These products were satirized in an old Simpsons episode where Homer hires a lawyer and the name of the firm is “I Can’t Believe It’s a Law Firm!”

    But seriously, your principles are sound and sane: we live in a world where artifice is preferred over reality. This is true commercially, politically, sociologically, culinarily and especially theologically. How many comment threads have we gone through discussing the artificial religions of the day which now worship social justice rather than God Himself? Men will long choose fool’s gold over the real thing and, these days, they always, always prefer the chaff to the wheat. You’ve seized upon an issue well worth exploring and which could be mined for even more poetry and commentary. I agree with Margaret. It’s fun and profound at the same time.

    The maxims bite. That’s exactly what you want them to do. I will long remember Tiffy and his/their/its/zem’s wildly inappropriate stiffy. Well done!

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you Brian! Yes, I came up with the poem after walking by “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” in a grocery store and realizing that not only the existence of such a product, but one with that brand name, speaks volumes about modern culture. The attitude is that if you can’t tell the difference, why should it make a difference at all? (This idea extrapolates easily to the whole transsexual mentality, for example, as I mentioned to Margaret.) Or, as the saying goes, “what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” (Why don’t we ask people who were killed by surprise about that one?) I also love “I Can’t Believe It’s a Law Firm!”

      That’s a really good idea, to mine the idea for more poetry. It’s such a big theme in today’s world that it’s certainly worthy of further exploration.

      I’m glad you love the maxims, especially that last one!

      Reply
  6. Cheryl Corey

    Your acerbic maxims are terrific, and now that you’ve tackled fake butter, can fake meat be far behind?

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Those obnoxious buffoons in the UN have just passed some stupid resolution calling on the United States to force its population to eat less meat.

      Fortunately, there isn’t anyone who takes that pretentious body of foreign jackasses seriously anymore, except themselves.

      Reply
      • Joshua C. Frank

        Why bother? Inflation will take care of that far more easily and effectively.

    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Cheryl. I walk by fake meat in the grocery store all the time and wonder why vegetarians give up meat and then want their plants to be treated with all kinds of chemicals to taste like meat. Then there are the plant “milks” that need stabilizers just to have the consistency of real milk. (In fact, I like to make jokes about people milking cashews and soybeans like they milk cows and goats.)

      Reply
  7. Warren Bonham

    Like you, I also can’t believe the world is still standing. In a world without real butter, meat and where we’ll be forced to eat bugs perhaps ending the world wouldn’t be all that bad.

    Very entertaining while also hitting the center of the bullseye.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Warren. I find myself agreeing more and more with all of that.

      Reply
  9. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Josh, the toe-tapping beat and sing-song tone of ‘If You Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’ belies the serious message that rings from each sagacious stanza. I love it! I thoroughly enjoyed your rhyming maxims too, especially #3… I totally relate to the sentiment. Wonderful stuff!

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you Susan! I’m so glad you like these. I thought of Maxim III when I realized I couldn’t tell headlines from parody newspapers like The Babylon Bee from real headlines. Satire is getting harder and harder to do as they do things we couldn’t imagine anyone would ever actually do.

      Reply
  10. Joshua C. Frank

    I’m honored that “If You Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” was among the third-place winners in the annual competition!

    Reply

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