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The Expert Class
“Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see”
—Benjamin Franklin
The experts with professorships
are filled with such great certainty.
They warn us that the point that tips
our world into catastrophe,
is right around the corner and,
though they have erred repeatedly,
they say this time they understand
how they can save humanity.
Our politicians misconstrue
each new threat as reality,
to gain control of all we do
and increase their authority,
ignoring errors made before,
which fade into obscurity,
since when they talk, they sound so sure,
that we comply quite happily.
The media jumps right in too,
and do as they’re told happily.
They can’t care less what news is true,
they care about publicity.
Then activists start to assist
and state their views quite volubly.
Celebrities learn just the gist
so they can speak with gravity.
Then censors cancel those who doubt
and dare to speak out publicly,
so everybody else can shout,
“at last there’s unanimity.”
And when each point of no return
goes by without mass casualty,
nobody ever stops to learn
what could have been done differently.
It’s obvious our expert class,
since they are wrong so frequently,
don’t know their elbows from their as-
inine attempts at prophecy.
There’s just one way to persevere
and hold onto our sanity—
Believe in none of what we hear
and only half of what we see.
.
.
Warren Bonham is a private equity investor who lives in Southlake, Texas.
Warren, that is a great poem with perfect insight into the so-called experts who often tout vociferously and with unbridled certitude they know what is best and push for control of the rest of us. The tie-in with the experts and the media is undeniable, since they buy hook-line-and-sinker the spurious peripheral facts and misconceptions that seem to them apparent, even when actual facts and historical truths contradict the story. This poem really is expertly written including dividing up the word asinine!
I’m glad you enjoyed it, especially the “asinine” part. It was a struggle coming up with something that worked there.
The ‘expert class’ can perhaps be described by the old book and movie
titles; Ship Of Fools. They are completely oblivious of their own insanity.
I had never heard of that movie/book before but I just did a quick online scan. It sounds like it’s spot-on. That’s a great analogy.
An expert poem by Warren Bonham, and an expertly chosen illustration by Evan Mantyk. I think Evan has a genie in a magic lamp who gets him these absolutely perfect, difficult-to-find pictures!
Bonham’s iambic tetrameter ABAB lines are very neatly constructed, and maintaining the B rhyme throughout (twenty different words!) was no easy trick.
The poem addresses an issue that cries out for discussion — the domination of the Western world, and much of the rest, by self-appointed “experts” who presume to tell us what to think, what to say, what to do, and how to react. Such people are insufferable swine and need to smacked down HARD. Academics, journalists, government bureaucrats, establishment politicians, jurists, woke capitalists, talking heads, reformers — they won’t SHUT THE HELL UP, and leave us alone!
These are dangerous, power-hungry, narcissistically self-convinced and self-absorbed fanatics who want to control the world. And quite frankly, they don’t really care if they are right or wrong. They just insist on being obeyed.
I’m glad you picked up on the structure. Once selected, it became a straight-jacket that was hard to fit things neatly into. You also summarized the situation very passionately and accurately. Thanks!
Warren, the rhythm and expert rhymes of this poem had me enjoying it all the way through. I bet it was fun to write.
It’s a sad topic but it was definitely fun to write. Thanks for the comment.
What a poem–perceptive, astutely critical, entertaining, and with many beauties of poetic craft! I was first struck by the logical construction of the sentences, and then their shaping into stanza paragraphs, with nothing of rhythm sacrificed to good grammar and coherent development of ideas.
The expert rhyme has already been noticed, but there’s more to enjoy in it. Rhyming words with a final long “e” is not hard in English, and therefore I often follow French practice. This kind of rhyming is even easier in French, and thus French poets, to apply some art to it, consider that there must be two elements to a rhyme sound, one consonant and one vowel. Warren, you vary your TEEs and LEEs so that the reader does not get tired of one repeated too often–and you have a FEE near the beginning, while you save two SEEs for the end. This avoids monotony and enlivens simple sound choices, all the while meeting requirements of a difficult rhyme scheme.
You have, as well, a musical variation in the flow of ideas. It starts and ends at moderate speed, but in stanzas 3 and 4, the tempo picks up as you quickly add media, activists, celebrities and censors. Beginning and end are also distinguished by the quotation from Franklin as your epigraph, versified in your final lines to draw to a classically finished close.
I rarely like breaking words as you do with “asinine,” but in this poem the effect is masterful, thanks to its contributing just a rare touch of incongruence that carries a double meaning. “Ass” suits rhyme and mocks experts, while “-inine” goes on in metrical and logical decorum to introduce AND complete another thought. Of our many, many poems making sociopolitical commentary, this is one of the finest in artistry.
Thanks so much for the very thorough review! I am very much a beginner at all of this and I enjoy learning from people who have obviously mastered the craft. You picked up on a lot of features that were intentional and some that I wish had been but weren’t (in particular the change in tempo).
Excellent poem. For a very readable and fascinating prose examination of the same subject I recommend “Intellectuals and Society” by Thomas Sowell. Sowell may me the “sole” surviving public intellectual of our time and this book may be his magnum opus.
I’m a huge Sowell fan. I haven’t read that one, but I will fix that glaring omission.
Thomas Sowell is one of a small number of important American thinkers of our era.