a war deserter executed during Civil War (Wellcome Images)‘Stolen Valor’ and Other Poetry for the Democratic National Convention, by Brian Yapko The Society August 19, 2024 Poetry, Satire, Villanelle 44 Comments . Stolen Valor —a poem in unheroic couplets Osama used his wives as human shields When being hunted down by Navy Seals; Bruce Ismay engineered Titanic’s fail Then slipped into a lifeboat ‘neath a veil. When Jefferson Davis faced Union duress He stole away in makeup and a dress. In 1812 as War left Hull perspiring He gave up Fort Detroit without once firing. Rank cowards show a full array of faults Each one displayed by Democrat Tim Walz. This communist with Minnesotan pallor Should be condemned and mocked for stolen valor; How brave he seemed to join the National Guard. It seemed good politics, a winning card For job advancement. It helped build a name. But he turned yellow when deployment came. “I cannot go to War,” he said. “I’m tired. It’s time I took my pension and retired.” He fled the chance to serve his country well Instead abandoning his men to hell. This conman who deems voters dumb as cattle Then lied about experience in battle— War combat that he claimed but had not seen. But wait. There’s more that’s equally obscene: As if our troops were just a game or wager, He lied and claimed the rank of sergeant major. He smirked with all the arrogance of Fauci And flaunted stolen valor with Pelosi. For power’s sake this man would gladly bump us All to hell. He has no moral compass. Not only is this man the prince of lies— He’s done a hundred things we should despise. With Harris he will lead this land to schism. It starts with bald-faced antisemitism. How do I know this man’s unfit to lead? Because my eyes are open. I can read. He lacks all common sense. Not one iota. He’s blithely sanfranciscoed Minnesota. He helps promote illegal immigration And wants to defund every sheriff station. All criminals get liberty in silence— Especially the ones who kill in violence. And prosecutions? Something to avoid To honor the achievements of George Floyd. When riots happened he could not be found. As Minneapolis burned to the ground Walz fiddled and appeared as blind as Homer. He gushes for Hamas-fan Ilhan Omar. Walz seems to like a good terror attack When it is Israel that’s stabbed in the back. This teacher-pimp who strokes the C.C.P. Hopes China will achieve ascendancy. Despite the leftists’ gaslighting and laud I see the ugly truth. Walz is a fraud Whose goal is to grab power and betray. A vote for stolen valor? Not today. I wouldn’t give this man the time of day. . Poet’s Note In 2005, as the war in Iraq became a violent insurgency against coalition forces occupying the country, Tim Walz—a senior non-commissioned officer who had begun his military career as an infantryman with the Nebraska National Guard—abandoned his Minnesota National Guard field artillery unit by retiring once his unit was called up to serve under fire. In the words of Greg Walker, a decorated soldier who served as a Green Beret in El Salvador while on active duty in the Army and later in Operation Iraqi Freedom with the Army National Guard 19th Special Forces Group: “If Walz really is so ’damn proud’ of his record, then why was he so dishonest about it afterward? Why did he misrepresent the manner in which he retired? Why did he misrepresent his rank upon retirement, even allowing former Speaker Nancy Pelosi to state it falsely in his presence without correcting the record? Why did Walz misrepresent himself as a combat veteran, stating that he had carried ‘weapons of war…in war,’ when he didn’t? Why did he nod in affirmation when others said of him, to his face, on video disseminated nationwide, that he had served in Afghanistan, when he never did so?” Despite his misrepresentations, Walz did not retire as a command sergeant major. According to the regulations governing promotion, Master Sgt. Walz was required to complete the Sergeant Major Academy to attain this rank. A critical aspect to attend this academy was his signed agreement to serve an additional two years of service in uniform at that rank, were he to successfully graduate. Walz’s deceit continued when he was elected to the House of Representatives and had a challenge coin made depicting a rank he did not earn.” (source) . . Kamala Unburdened —a villanelle Unburdened by the failures that have been I’ll lift up those who’ve suffered in the past. Believe me. You’ll be next if I should win. My sense of truth is vague. I prefer spin And spouting fiction very loud and fast, Unburdened by the failures that have been! I’ll take it on the lips, not just the chin. The oral skills I’ve mastered are a blast. Believe me, you’ll be next if I should win. What church? Get real. I don’t believe in sin. Call me a D.E.I. iconoclast, Unburdened by the failures that have been! A brainless cackle peppers my chagrin As one who fights for those who are served last. Believe me, you’ll be next if I should win. But justice won’t be based just on your skin. Conservatives should be crushed and harassed. Unburdened by the failures that have been Believe me, you’ll be next if I should win. . . Brian Yapko is a retired lawyer whose poetry has appeared in over fifty journals. He is the winner of the 2023 SCP International Poetry Competition. Brian is also the author of several short stories, the science fiction novel El Nuevo Mundo and the gothic archaeological novel Bleeding Stone. He lives in Wimauma, Florida. NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets. The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary. CODEC Stories:Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) 44 Responses Mark Stellinga August 19, 2024 Your skills as a top-notch poet are, again, on display here, Brian. Great job, both. What a great way to consume idle hours, penning and fine-tuning works this meaningful. Isn’t it lovely to be so good at this – 🙂 Reply Brian A. Yapko August 20, 2024 Thank you, Mark. I wish I had more idle hours to write about things I actually love. I would much rather write about moonlight and ancient ruins but the times just don’t seem to allow for it. Reply Mark Stellinga August 21, 2024 I steal a couple hours whenever possible so I can dedicate penning time to both – like you, political pieces are definitely not my preference, but I’m driven by the same demanding obligations that you, SJB, and several other cultural warrior poets are. Joseph S. Salemi August 19, 2024 Tim Walz is a disgrace to the United States. He chickens out of combat duty, taking retirement the minute his unit is called up, and then claims that he served under fire in combat. He pretends to have held a rank that he never attained, and then has the nerve to carry a challenge coin with that rank on it. No real soldier ever wears a decoration or rank that he did not earn by blood or valor. My father had a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a Combat Infantryman’s Badge, and his body had the German Kruppstahl in it that gave him the right to those honors. When I read about this fat Communist scumbag Walz I want to puke. As for that cackling bitch Kamala, who can’t utter a clear English sentence, you’d have to brain-dead to want her in any position of power. Reply Brian A. Yapko August 20, 2024 Joe, I could not agree more. The Democrats have done something remarkable — they’ve produced a ticket of people so contemptible that I cannot stand to even look at them. That’s quite an achievement. And thank you for inspiring me to write the Walz poem. With the DNC dominating the news this week it seemed like a good thing to poetically call BS on him. And what you said in your comment is far more effective than what I said in rhyme! It just goes to show you that poetry does have its limits. Reply Patricia Allred August 21, 2024 Hello, Brian! You have done it again! Like a professor, have pointed out that the current “Demented Democrats,” you have clearly underlined in bold red..a Communist’s color, the glaring errors and character defects in them, without missing a beat. I am sure you were both sneering and laughing as you created such sharp humor. Walz ought to hang out with Prince Harry! By the way, have you noticed that Walz wears a jacket far too short? Then when on stage with”Mrs Word Salad”, turns his back to the audience, jumps in the air! .At which point, the jacket crawls up his back, showing his large derriere! Yikes! He looks like a candidate on speed! And yes, Democrats live in an alternate universe! What other party kills the unborn outside the convention center or does vasectomies free of charge? Come one, come all! That 20 foot IUD was grotesque. But I looked online, and I guess it rravels to other Democratic events! Say,what.! This is a favorite poem to me, dear Brian.!The courage to callout pure nonsense is most commendable. I love writing political pieces! Especially NOW, to wake people up! Such a talent you are! Patricia Reply Brian Yapko August 22, 2024 Thank you for this truly generous comment, Patricia! I would like to say you’re right about laughing as I created the poem but sneering is about all I could muster. And I agree — Walz does look like a candidate on speed. And with the vasectomy center and the abortion celebrations (and the unmentioned Hamas protests), I am thoroughly disgusted with the Democrats. I cringe that I ever belonged to that party. I need to take a shower. Warren Bonham August 20, 2024 They’ve put together quite the Dream Team. You’ve masterfully and entertainingly uncovered what the DNC and the Media very much want to keep covered. Reply Brian A. Yapko August 20, 2024 Thanks, Warren. I consider them a Nightmare Team. And am glad to pull the covers off their deceptions. If only those who will be giving a knee-jerk vote to the Democrats weren’t so gullible and ideologically-driven. Imagine if they could actually look at and weigh evidence rather than accept everything they are told to believe. Reply Roy E. Peterson August 20, 2024 I am especially enamored with the line “he sanfranciscoed Minnesota!” They both are unfit for any office including the ones they presently occupy, yet here they are with apostate admirers. What great historical references you made that have damaged us in the past. Maybe there should be a song, “Walzing Kamala” like “Waltzing Matilda.” The cowardice of Walz is certainly manifest in every phase of this life as is the “the sense of truth” suffering in the face of lies by Harris. These are perfect accompaniments to the DNC self-love fest this week and written brilliantly. Reply Brian A. Yapko August 20, 2024 Thank you very much indeed, Roy. I’m glad the phrasing pleased you but I regret that it is in the context of a poem which spotlights a man I consider highly dishonorable and destructive. I love your Waltzing Kamala idea for a poem. You should write it! Reply Lannie David Brockstein August 20, 2024 The Demented Party is pretending that nobody should have a problem with Tim Walz the putz self-identifying as a combat veteran. President O’Brandon and Shrillery Clinton are pretending that the Muslim supremacist government of Iran is filled with fear, at the thought of Kamalek Hamas putting a stop to its illegal nuclear weapons program. Thank you Brian, for having shined a light on the lies of those goddamn bozos. From Lannie. P.S. Regarding the VP’s tendency to excessively repeat her sentences, the medical term for that is “palilalia”. It is a symptom of autism: Orion Kelly – That Autistic Guy – “Breaking Down Palilalia and Autism – The Connection & Causes”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5YRsaHIijE Reply Brian A. Yapko August 20, 2024 Thank you so much, Lannie. I think you’ve hit on something with Walz’s “self-identifying” as a combat veteran. This self-identifying stuff seems to be a recurring theme among the Democrats and leftists in general. They somehow think they’ve transcended a material world where gender and race and fiscal responsibility and a dozen other have objective reality. But this is pure delusion. They’ve transcended nothing. They’ve entered a fantasy world in which all that matters is the subjective. That is all going to come crashing down sooner or later. And when it does it will take nations and security and wealth and achievement with it. And they call conservatives “mean.” Reply Robert Lacey August 21, 2024 To be fair, Donald Trump avoided serving his country during the Vietnam War. A podiatrist in Queens, who rented office space from Trump’s father, gave him a dubious bone-spur diagnosis in 1968, right when he could have been called up. Like many other privileged young men at the time, Trump found a way to dodge the draft. Walz, on the other hand, was under no obligation to serve in the Iraq War. I don’t know if he supported the war, but it is likely that he didn’t or, at the very least, had serious reservations about it. Is there really any dishonor in leaving the National Guard after over twenty years of service when he heard that his unit might be deployed to Iraq and participate in what was an unjust war? Perhaps Trump had similar feelings about the Vietnam War… Reply Joseph S. Salemi August 21, 2024 The doctor who allegedly made a “dubious” diagnosis is now conveniently dead and cannot be questioned. The story was told by his two daughters, who have both confessed to being ferocious anti-Trump Democrats. They gave this story to the New York Times (where else?) back in 2018, when liberals were in a particularly violent stage of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It has been resuscitated now precisely because of the revelations about Tim Walz’s lies and cowardice. Walz is now tongue-tied about his fraudulence, and the Democrats are frantically trying to save his ass. This unsubstantiated podiatrist story is a desperate attempt by Democrats to pull off a “tu quoque” fallacy. When your guy is accused of a crime, immediately blame his opponent for the same thing. Even if the story were true, it has no bearing at all on the blatant avoidance of combat duty by Tim Walz, and no bearing at all about his sheer effrontery in trying to pose as a combat veteran. Many young men escaped the Vietnam War because of small medical problems that might seem minor to us. I myself was of prime military age in 1968, and was summoned in the draft. I was not accepted for service because of poor eyesight and sinusitis, which was the sole decision of the military doctors at the examination, and no one else. Other young men were dismissed for being overweight, or underweight, or with skin conditions, or with flat feet, or with hernias. And bone spurs are fairly common among men who are good athletes, as Donald Trump always was. You might remember that Joe DiMaggio was often kept out of action as a ball player because of bone spurs in his heels. It should also be noted that from 1965 to 1970 a huge number of male baby-boomers were coming of age for military service. There were over 300 guys in the early morning medical exam that I was called for, and an afternoon exam was scheduled to handle a similar number. That meant that over 3000 men were being screened every single week. The military could afford to be very choosy about the men taken for induction. Only the strongest and healthiest were picked. Those of us who did not meet those standards were given a 1-Y deferment, which meant that we could only be called for service in a national emergency, or after an official declaration of war As for your argument that it is OK for someone to evade combat service if he has political issues with the war being fought… if that were the case, why the hell didn’t Walz quit earlier than he did, and apply for status as a Conscientious Objector? The obvious reality is that the guy wanted to have the status of a soldier as a way to grease his path into politics and get conservative votes (precisely why he has been picked by the Democrat left, to counterbalance this sick leftist bitch Kamala). You don’t join the National Guard for “twenty years of service” just to be a weekend warrior who does maneuvers in the countryside. You are in it to serve your country when your country needs you. Walz is the typical left-liberal phony — he shows off as a tough, military veteran to get votes, and hopes that nobody remembers that in actual fact he chickened out. Reply Robert Lacey August 21, 2024 I don’t think the ad hominem attack on Harris is called for. Your use of a misogynistic slur betrays your fear of her. The polls show that, unlike Biden, she can win in November. As for her being a leftist, that’s laughable. Speaking from the left, I can assure you she is not the ideal progressive candidate we would prefer. Hardly. For most of her career she was a prosecutor who supported the punitive turn in our criminal justice system, which led to mass incarceration and the militarization of law enforcement. When she ran for president in 2020, she positioned herself as an uninspiring moderate who would not express support for any progressive policies, such as Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. She has since moved to the left to remain in step with the Democrats’ ideological shift, but her instincts are decidedly not leftist. She’s a cautious political animal who seeks the center whenever she can. But she has one thing going for her: a respect for our democratic institutions and norms which Trump and his radical supporters are eager to tear down. The true conservatives today are the Democrats, who want to preserve the American political tradition, its institutions, and the rules that govern them. Joseph S. Salemi August 22, 2024 Like all leftists, you live in an alternate universe. You call Kamala a moderate and a centrist? Excuse me while I laugh. She’ll be moderate and centrist for as long as it takes to gain power, and then she’ll do whatever the hell she pleases. I suppose you haven’t noticed that she has so far refused to make any serious statement (as opposed to laughing, smiling, and emoting) about her position on important issues, or taken any real questions from the press. She just wants to float on a cloud of hoopla. You don’t like my language? Too damn bad. It’s not ad hominem to call out a sick leftist bitch for being precisely that. It’s purely descriptive. Also, you have carefully avoided dealing with anything that I have brought up in my post concerning Walz and military service. Perhaps it’s a subject that you’d like to avoid, in the same way that Mainstream Media avoids it. Brian A. Yapko August 22, 2024 Mr. Lacey, we all want to be fair-minded. That is the reason we must look past propagandistic talking points and put ideology aside to actually assess things as they are and not as we fantasize them to be. I am, frankly, too old and too fat to abide being gaslit by a leftist ideologue, which — after reading this comment and your subsequent comment to Dr. Salemi — appears to be your particular bent. You want fair-minded, I’ll give you fair-minded because I’ve seen both sides of the cultural divide — far, far longer on the left than on the right. I’m a gay man who was a card-carrying Democrat for 45 years until I finally realized the extent to which I was being manipulated and used. I marched, I protested, I filed civil rights lawsuit, I did all the leftist things that were expected of me by the leftist hegemony. But over the course of the last few years, I could no longer abide being told that what I saw with my own eyes was not true. How far must a person allow himself to be gaslit without finally throwing off the yoke? I’ve read what you said with care. I reject it as the words of someone with a toxic agenda. You don’t care about the poetry here. You are here to recruit and sow division. Now I’ve been a lawyer for 35 years and I’ve seen every type of lying witness that there is. I’ve also seen every specious argument imaginable. Yours is not even interesting, and is based on false equivalence. This seems deliberate, sir, and I resent it. The poem, if you notice, is titled “Stolen Valor.” I do not recall one instance of Donald Trump pimping out fake military service in order to advance his career. I do not see Donald Trump claiming the valor of having been in combat with men who actually died or were disabled and injured for their country. I do not see Donald Trump being wrongly touted as a war hero by other politicians while he blithely beams and makes the deliberate choice not to correct them. I do not see Donald Trump accepting honors for a rank he never achieved. The more I write this the angrier I get when I consider my father who served with the U.S. Army in Germany, or Dr. Salemi’s father who was injured in service, or the countless honorable men and women I’ve known who did not whine about deployment but served when called to do so. Because they loved their country. I consider Walz so vile that it is plain to me that he is a man (or do you consider “man” a forbidden word?) so vile that only a leftist could abide him. Soldier after soldier has condemned him for not only his cowardice but for his lies. Stealing valor from people who actually earned it is despicable. If you like that, by all means vote for it. As for Kamala Harris, she was determined to be the most far-left member of the Senate in 2020. She has embraced aspects of socialism, antisemitism, defunding the police, bailing out rioters and vandals, the Squad and promoting “wokehood” (“We must stay woke, everybody.”) that you must be far left indeed to consider her a centrist. Social engineering is anathema to most sane people who have read 1984 and Brave New World. You may enjoy a good Cultural Revolution every so often, sir, but most people who value their freedoms, or who do not think like 17 year olds who have it all figured out, do not. Reply Brian A. Yapko August 22, 2024 More than half of the veterans in the House and Senate slammed Democratic running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) on Wednesday for lying about his military career in what critics call a classic case of “stolen valor.” In a three-page memo put out by the Trump-Vance campaign, 50 veterans demanded an apology and explanation from Walz, who lied about being in combat and his rank at retirement. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/3129001/veterans-house-senate-condemn-walz-stolen-valor/ Reply Susan Jarvis Bryant August 22, 2024 Brian, as a poet who loves a bit of hard-hitting satire to get a grave point across, your poems have delighted me. Not only do you manage to highlight the wickedness and skullduggery afoot in the circus arena of politics, you do so in tight form with excellent use of poetic devices. To pull off a villanelle as smooth and amusing as “Kamala Unburdened” (hilariously apt title) in a short space of time is to be admired. Great stuff!! Reply Brian A. Yapko August 22, 2024 Thank you so much, Susan! I know you to be the consummate poet of hard-hitting satire so receiving this praise from you is deeply meaningful. I love your observation about “wickedness and skullduggery afoot in the circus arena of politics.” What a show that would be! Tightrope walkers, lion-tamers. And a ridiculous surfeit of clowns. I think there may be a poem in your circus conceit! I hope you run with it! Reply Robert Lacey August 22, 2024 I DID come to this site for the poetry, and I deeply appreciate its commitment to form and tradition. I was just surprised to read overtly political verse and commentary and felt compelled to respond. I’m not a troll out to sow division or gaslight anyone. I genuinely disagree with some of you on the issues addressed here. You might be surprised to hear my conservative position on a whole host of issues. My progressivism is not born of a radical need to revolt against or tear down the establishment. I embrace progressive means (eg, strong labor unions, higher minimum wage, regulation of rapacious corporations, etc.) to achieve conservative ends (eg, social stability and unity, strong institutions and traditions that foster the commonweal, etc.). In fact, I’ve written a book about this kind of conservatism if you care to check it out. I won’t convince you to subscribe to my views, but I hope you see that I engaged here in good faith. My love for the great books, classical literature, and formal verse is what drew me to this site and organization. And I’ll continue to enjoy reading, and learning from, the poets here. Reply Paul Freeman August 23, 2024 You’ll find there’s a certain amount of intolerance, paranoia and tag team bullying, Robert, if you’re not in lockstep on certain issues, so better to stick to non-controversial poems to comment on, then you won’t be accused of marauding. Reply Joshua C. Frank August 24, 2024 You leftists love to portray yourselves as innocent victims of us evil right-wingers. In reality, I’ve tried joining other writing groups, but because nearly everyone there is as staunch a leftist as you guys, I ended up being on the other end of much worse than anything you’ve seen here, and for much less. You attribute what people say to you to malice, but I think it’s more a fundamental incompatibility between the two worldviews. I just saw a meme that said, “You don’t like J.K. Rowling because of the “TE” in TERF. I don’t like J.K. Rowling because of the “RF” in TERF. We are not the same.” And that’s the least of it! Mike Bryant August 24, 2024 I believe that the largest difference between most people and the screaming one-worlders is a belief in the spiritual. Beyond that, I believe that over 90% of people understand, accept and believe that we live in a universe permeated by the spiritual. The other 10% are the materialists. A portion of that 10% has so perfectly divided so many good-hearted people that their numbers appear to be overwhelming. They are not. Their lies ARE overwhelming. And that is why they must shut down the truth and divide people along as many issues as possible. The SCP is a haven for culture, rhythm, rhyme and rapture. Whenever anyone arrives here at SCP to amplify the messages that divide people and thereby enable tyranny, I ask myself if they are the liars or the fooled. In some cases they seem to be both. Why would anyone come to SCP, one of a few small glints of light in a darkened world, to push an ideology? Yes, that is exactly what they are doing. And then, when one or two or three present another view, they claim victimhood. There are no tag teams here at SCP, Paul. Only a handful of people that reject the false promises of collectivism and are speaking out against it on a rare site that champions free speech. Brian, thank you for opening eyes and minds with your excellent poetry. Joshua C. Frank August 24, 2024 “Why would anyone come to SCP, one of a few small glints of light in a darkened world, to push an ideology?” Because, like the Borg of the various Star Trek series, they can’t disobey their one-mind programming to stamp out the last embers of light, lest we multiply and vastly outnumber them. Our side, with its inclination toward large families, would win a fair fight by procreation alone. That’s why modern culture can’t handle a fair fight. So it connives and cheats every way it can to destroy our way as much as possible. Remember that, like the Pharisees, they are of their father the devil. Not that I’m letting the right off the hook. The right has allowed itself to be deceived into trading its birthright for a mess of pottage like Esau, to the point where even many far-right extremists are just the leftists of the Great Depression era. The nickname “cuckservatives,” meaning that conservatives have willingly allowed themselves to be cuckolded, is spot on. We don’t need conservatism, we need traditionalism. Brian A. Yapko August 24, 2024 Mike, thank you very much for the generous comment on the poem and for your insights on our dire cultural divide. I think you have a strong point regarding spiritual versus material. I myself think of it as being evidence-based versus ideologically-based. Leftist ideologues like to claim “evidence-based” for themselves. They’re the party of science, don’t you know, along with love and tolerance — and screw you to hell if you don’t get their pronouns correct, you rotten transphobic tin-foil-hat Zionist colonizer! But I digress. Leftists (remember, I was one!) have ideologies which mask as evidence-based but they reject or trivialize any evidence that doesn’t support their preconcieved/predetermined ideology. Their ideologies are furthe premised on the peculiar (and obviously fallacious) notion that the human brain has no limitations on comprehension. For leftists, we live in a material world and so nothing else matters, from puberty blockers to euthanasia-on-demand. They have a predilection to giving great weight to evidence which is cherry-picked to support their ideology. In short, things are deemed true, in part, because they WANT them to be true. And if they are not technically true, they will MAKE them true. (How many trials I have been involved in where a battle of experts was, in reality, a battle of advocates paid for an opinion!) I’m tired of people mishandling evidence and putting their fingers on the scale to justify a particular point of view. For myself, so long as it is not obviously propagandistically-derived and we understand that human comprehension has limitations, I prefer solid, objective evidence grounded in reality and history– no fingers on the scale, no social-engineering. Let objective evidence and a dose of humility shape the ideology and not the other way around. Joseph S. Salemi August 24, 2024 Let me inject something here. Robert Lacey may indeed have come to the SCP because he appreciates formal, traditional poetry. And I don’t think any of us here would object to that. We have a worldwide readership, and certainly there are different political views among them. The evidence that helps explain what’s going on is this. Lacey says: “I was just surprised to read overtly political verse and commentary and felt compelled to respond.” As Hamlet said, “There’s the rub.” If Lacey had found overtly political verse and commentary of a left-liberal nature at some other poetry website, he would have had no problem with it at all, and in fact it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to make any objection to it or comment about it. He would have considered it simply natural and acceptable and expected. What he was surprised at was the mere existence of rightist and conservative poems and commentary. THAT was what shocked him. It didn’t fit in with his expectations and sense of propriety. He acted like Anthony Comstock seeing a female nude. “Overtly political verse and commentary” is OK if it’s left-liberal; if it is rightist or conservative it is upsetting. This is one major difference between censorship in the old Soviet Union, and the utterly intrusive mind-control that dominates left-liberal opinion today. When someone pointed out to Stalin in the 1930s that there was an obscure magazine being published in Russia that was still pro-Czarist, he replied “So what? They’re just a small group with no power and influence, with a tiny readership. Leave them alone.” But today, ANY expression of rightist or conservative opinion, no matter how small or niche-market in appeal, sets the left off like a bomb. They are amazed to see it, and they are impelled to attack it. If Lacey had simply appreciated the poetry here, devoting his attention to aesthetics and metrical issues, there would have been no fight. But he was “surprised,” and “compelled to respond.” When he gets blasted in return, he feels himself a victim — a sacrosanct status for anyone who is a left-liberal today. Joseph S. Salemi August 22, 2024 Ah, how predictable. When an admitted leftist is called out, he slips back — chameleon-like — into the protective coloration of a “progressive” working for unimpeachable goals. This is why Lenin called soft-focus liberals “useful idiots.” Reply Robert Lacey August 22, 2024 I never said I was a leftist. I said I was on the left. There’s a difference. I doubt this will persuade you that I’m anything but an unwitting pawn of the Marxist-Leninist left, but this piece succinctly captures what I tried to do with my larger project. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/churchills-compassionate-conservatism/ Reply Joseph S. Salemi August 22, 2024 OK, so you’re a man of the left pretending to be a staunch defender of order and tradition. No wonder your heroes are Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Peter Viereck — the three champions of the elite over the common man. Brian A. Yapko August 23, 2024 Thank you for the clarification of your views, Mr. Lacey. Joshua C. Frank August 23, 2024 Why do we bother dignifying anything these leftist marauders say with a response? It seems to me, more and more, that doing this is just buying into their game and their rules. The very foundations of their ideas of what’s right and wrong are in direct opposition to ours, to say the least, and we will no more change their minds than they will change ours. At this point, there’s nothing left to do but ridicule them in our poems, as is being done in “Kamala Unburdened.” Margaret Coats August 23, 2024 In three years of active-duty regular Army service at a post well supplied with general officers, I never encountered a sergeant major. Having reached the lowest non-commissioned rank of buck sergeant, I had to be scrupulous about minor things like burning bags of classified trash or good company order marching in holiday parades. Those at the top non-commissioned rank of sergeant major, even today, have a reputation as strident sticklers for military honors, customs, and courtesies, so much so that adjustment to civilian life on retirement is difficult. It seems Master Sergeant Walz was not the type to make the grade. Reply Brian A. Yapko August 23, 2024 Thank you for reading and commenting, Margaret. Thank you as well for your service to our country! Your experience in the Army gives considerable weight to your criticism of Walz. Reply Joshua C. Frank August 23, 2024 Brian, these are great! I know everything I need to about Walz thanks to the first poem (my favorite line is, “He’s blindly sanfranciscoed Minnesota,” though I can’t help but wonder whether his doing so was actually intentional given leftists’ desire to assimilate and ruin the whole world), and the second really made me laugh because it’s all so true! Reply Brian A. Yapko August 24, 2024 Thank you so much, Josh! Normally I would hate to reduce a politician down to the lines of a poem but here I feel I’ve actually elevated Walz more than he deserves. You’re probably right about the “blindly” part. His actions seem deliberate rather than negligent. I may have to change it to “blithely.” I’ll let Mike know if I decide to change it. Good eye! Reply Robert Lacey August 31, 2024 Oh, I’m not a victim, and I never said I was. Go back and check the thread. I’m doing just fine. If anyone is playing the victim here, it’s those of you who have accused me of being a “leftist marauder” who wants to “recruit and sow division” and “push an ideology,” a champion of elitism who wants to rule over “the common man.” Seething with hatred and resentment, you reveal yourselves. You are the ones who feel threatened and therefore compelled to lash out at someone whose only sin was to question the characterization of Walz as a communist and a coward and Harris as a “sick leftist bitch.” I wasn’t “upset.” I merely disagreed with your unsubstantiated assertions and indecorous language. Listen: If I’m the marauder eager to stage a cultural revolution in this story, which clearly means I’m the villain, who’s the self-proclaimed victim here? The tone of many posts written in this thread reflects the psychology of the “ascetic priest” about whom Nietzsche warned in “The Genealogy of Morals”: “I suffer: someone must be to blame for it.” Political extremists of all kinds (i.e., ideologues) are quick to traffic in the politics of victimhood and blame, resentment and recrimination, and bring an end to any hope of discussion. Now, as for my initial reaction to “Stolen Valor,” if you’re going to write verse that makes a political statement, it’s not unreasonable for someone to respond to more than just the aesthetics. As much as I enjoy formal poetry, what makes a poem goes well beyond meter and rhyme. I don’t say this to disparage Mr. Yapko’s work. He’s clearly an accomplished poet. This just doesn’t happen to be his best work. Angry reactions to political events rarely produce worthwhile art. So, yeah, I’m doing quite fine. You are the angry ones. Indeed, your hysteria smacks of a rather bizarre neo-McCarthyism. Peter Viereck wrote, “McCarthyism was the revenge of the noses that for years were pressed against the outside windowpane while Marie Antoinette danced.” Of all the haters in this world, among the greatest are the declassed intellectuals. As far as I can tell, though, there are no real victims here. None of us should be that angry or resentful. After all, we enjoy the privilege of cultivating our poetic sensibilities. What a gift! But I see reason to be disappointed, even despairing. I am disappointed with how this thread has unfolded because I see a missed opportunity for fruitful dialogue, which impoverishes us all. I, too, share the traditionalist concerns about the disenchantment and deracination that the acids of modernity have wrought. I, too, fear the encroachments of technology on what we see as “the human.” I, too, worry about social atomization and the disappearance of rooted communities. I may not agree with your solution to these problems, particularly the reactionary impulse to restore some mythic past, but I share many of your deep concerns. I envision an edifying discussion if everyone removed his ideological blinders. And, yes, I include myself when I say “everyone.” Sadly, the only thing you “victims” can see is a communist marauder, a godless materialist bent on bringing darkness to your American pastoral. Reply Joseph S. Salemi August 31, 2024 Lacey, you can play that plangent violin of mild-mannered and decorous liberalism at other websites, but you can’t play it here. We’ve been red-pilled against it. How typical of you to quote Viereck, the fake conservative and anti-populist who wanted elite control over everything. It’s the same old aristocratic attitude: we can maintain everything nice and comfy as long as we keep the rednecks down. You’re a confessed man of the left, but you still “share our concerns” and our “worries,” and you want “fruitful dialogue and “edifying discussion.” Do you have any idea how sickening that kind of mealy-mouthed, epicene rhetoric sounds to us? We don’t want to talk to you. We have heard enough pious left-liberal claptrap and lies as you try to create cover for the slow erosion of our rights and our identity by your allies on the left. Yes, your allies. When push comes to shove, you will vote with them. You call us “hateful” and “resentful”? Why don’t you take a good hard look at your friends and allies on the left, and tell us what you see there? Do both yourself and us a favor, and get lost. Reply Robert Lacey September 1, 2024 Thanks for proving my point. I didn’t want to be right, but there’s some recompense to be found there, I suppose. As for the erosion of your rights, you seem perfectly at liberty to say what you want on this site. I think that’s a good thing. And most Democratic leaders would agree. I don’t see Biden’s secret police coming after you at any rate. Unfortunately, when you say my comments aren’t welcome (“We don’t want to talk to you”) and tell me to leave the site (“get lost”), you make it clear that you have no interest in extending those rights to someone with whom you disagree. Too bad. I’m genuinely interested in what you and others in this thread have to say, especially about the threats to liberty that Democrats supposedly pose. I am curious to hear what you think is at stake here. What have you suffered during eight years of Obama and almost four of Biden? Is it possible you’re raging against the wrong thing? Leftism isn’t your bogeyman. It’s modernity. And we have all suffered from it to varying degrees. Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, you condemn the Crystal Palace, which represents in his eyes the culmination of the scientific project to create a utopia by turning people into perfectly predictable stimulus-response mechanisms and thereby stripping them of their humanity. Our humanity, he says, comes from the fundamental freedom to choose and make mistakes. Science and technology promise happiness but threaten to turn each of us into an “organ stop.” This is a fear on which the right does not have a monopoly. As I tell my students, there is an Underground Man in all of us. He represents the inextinguishable human desire for freedom, even if holding on to it demands what the champions of science and reason consider deeply irrational behavior. But people on the left do not think that this legitimate fear necessitates giving up on human ingenuity when it devises viable ways of providing health care to everyone who needs it, addressing the savage inequalities in our education system, feeding and housing the poor and dispossessed, regulating rapacious corporations, strengthening the collective bargaining rights of workers, etc. I am far more concerned about corporate behemoths using big data and sophisticated algorithms, which threaten to curb my freedom and turn me into an “organ stop,” than I am about the collectivist state. For you, it’s the opposite. But we share a deep concern about modernity. Isn’t that sufficient common ground on which a productive discussion can be built? Aristotle said virtue can be found in the mean between excess and deficiency. We must call on human expertise to solve problems when we can, but also humbly recognize that not everything can be fixed in this imperfect world and that our hubris can make things worse if we’re not careful. You think the left is guilty of excess. It certainly has been in its worst moments. Ideologues of all stripes tend toward overreach. But the right has committed the equally harmful sin of deficiency. Let’s find agreement, however tentative, in the Aristotelian mean. Brian A. Yapko September 1, 2024 Mr. Lacey, I’m not sure where to begin with your comments both to me and to Dr. Salemi. You present the appearance of wanting to have a fair dialogue, but you do not give any indication of meaning it. Fair dialogue, to you, seems to mean that if we don’t agree with your point of view we are claiming victimhood. Well, that’s rich coming from the Left when it is they who have turned claiming victimhood into an art-form and using it as a springboard for the most appalling bullying, including but not limited to causes ranging from Defund the Police, DEI, BLM, the attack of the Transgender Hegemony, the attack on religion, the attack on Jews, all the way to attacks on anyone who doesn’t think along leftist woke politburo lines. You talk about attacks on free speech but it is the Left which has made it well-nigh impossible for conservative viewpoints to be disseminated (even Mark Zuckerberg has come clean on the pressure put upon Facebook by Democrats.) Every sensible comment regarding transgender overreach is labeled “hate-speech” and either gets you in Facebook jail or buried so that nothing is ever seen. Every sensible comment opposing slavery reparations for people who were never slaves in states which never had slaves paid for by people who never were slaves gets labeled “hate-speech.” Sensible criticism of Joe Biden and his mental state was slandered as “cheap fake.” Leftist points of view dominate in every sense of the word the media, and that includes poetry sites. I happen to be a gay man who writes poetry. Well, you’d think a gay poet would be able to get published in any poetry journal, but this is not so. I have been canceled by left-leaning journal after journal – BUT ONLY after I came out as someone who opposes Transgender overreach and who now identifies as a conservative. After being feted as a new LBGT voice (when they thought I lived under the rainbow and was a Democrat), I now cannot get a poem published other than on SCP because of my political convictions – convictions, incidentally, which were mainstream Democrat centrist only 15 years ago. I’ve already explained my history as a 45 year Democrat who finally became left the Democrat party because I was tired of gaslighting. But the overwhelming impetus was what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023 and the fact that there was an eruption of support after that date – FOR THE TERRORISTS. And that eruption of hate was either approved of, or ignored by the entire Democrat party, including people like Tlaib, Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, but also not condemned by Biden or Harris. I’m not a suicidal man, Mr. Lacy. I don’t support a party that wants to see me and my family dead. So you wonder what is it that has been lost under 8 years of Obama and 4 years of Biden? That’s a good place to start. My security. My ability to express myself as a conservative. My ability to express myself as a man of Jewish extraction without getting a swastika drawn on my house. My ability to get a poem published in a journal that normally celebrates the gay experience (but apparently only if you’re liberal.) My ability to rely on the police in the context of their being reviled and defunded. My ability to advocate for gay children who are being routinely misidentified as transgender so that an entire generation of gay people is getting wiped out. My ability to worship with my faith being mocked. My ability to read and understand a history which doesn’t continually get rewritten. My ability to enjoy a historic statue without it being defaced by people who hate this country. I won’t even touch on subjects like the economy, immigration, or other hot-button issues. You want to know why I act as if the culture war has personal application to me? Because it does. But that being said, I don’t like your condescending tone. You come across as someone who says “well, I’ve never been discriminated against, ergo there is no discrimination.” “I’ve never been the victim of a crime, ergo there’s no problem with crime.” “I had breakfast this morning, ergo there’s no hunger elsewhere in the world.” You are clearly an intelligent person and an accomplished one. But you have fallen in love with your own arguments and ability to reason. I know this from your condescension. I know this because I recognize the difference between an idealist which you may have been once and an ideologue, which is the frontier I believe you have crossed into. For what it’s worth, I do appreciate your recognition of my poetry in general and I share your view that this is not one of my best. It’s most definitely not. It’s an opinion piece set to rhyme and I wrote it the night before it was published. But I felt my viewpoint needed to be shared. I shared it, you shared your reservations about it and I would have hoped that this would be the end of it. You know, you are always free to write a poem of your own and get it published rather than continuing to glom onto mine. I’m not going to tell you not to show up at this site. I don’t have that authority. But I do know that if I showed up at 99 out of 100 poetry sites and started explaining to the leftist leaning poets and readers there why they should pay more attention to reasonable conservatives, I would receive more hate that you can imagine. Have, in fact. And, morever, such an experience occurred not long ago on a site in which a regular SCP poet dared to criticize the quality of Amanda Gorman’s poetry. It erupted into a conservative-bashing hate-fest that turned personal and frightening. “How dare you, you racist colonial jerk?” That’s what we get now for stating a non-racist, defensible position that doesn’t align with the woke hegemony. We have basically one conservative poetry site and you can’t even leave that to us. Instead of commenting and moving-on, you chose to engage, pontificate and argue. That doesn’t sound to me like you’re here for the poetry. Your words may say you want a dialogue, but your actions indicate that you want to colonize and convert. We’re dazzled by your reasoning abilities and your fair-mindedness. But these are fractious times and it is hard for me to understand your insistence on debate. This isn’t Facebook. By analogy, why would you make a point of attending the Republican National Convention only to argue Democrat talking points? You’d have that right, of course, but your expectation of winning converts and popularity contests would be both naive and intrusively belligerent. Reply Robert Lacey September 1, 2024 Thank you for this response. I appreciate your taking the time to express your thoughts. I apologize for my condescending tone. I will give it a rest. I had no intention of converting anyone, btw. I do not have such faith in my powers of persuasion. For what it’s worth, I hope this discussion, however fraught, convinces you that not all people on the left are on an ideological crusade, eager to cancel or demonize those on the right. I teach political theory and have turned to writing poetry only recently (a little over two years ago?) in part to escape politics and the fractured world you mentioned. I discovered this site quite by accident and have happily learned more about meter and different ways of constructing formal poetry. I’ll return to being an invisible reader. Thank you. Joseph S. Salemi September 1, 2024 Lacey, when you say “productive discussion” you mean this: Left-liberals lecture us and orate, while we listen, ask a few timid questions, and then agree with what left-liberals say. That’s not a discussion. That’s a sermon. Are you so intellectually blind that you haven’t noticed the almost absolute control that people of your ilk exercise over Mainstream Media, both on-air and in print? Where’s the “productive discussion” in that? When you say “let’s find agreement, however tentative,” that is pure effrontery on your part. Everything that the left does is designed not “find agreement” but to gain power, and to impose it unilaterally on those who oppose them. Have you been to Canada? Have you followed the news about the complete collapse of free speech in the United Kingdom? Have you read of how the governments of both France and Germany have used every illegal method they can find to suppress the vote of rightists? Have you watched how (for the same purpose of suppressing the conservative vote) over ten million illegal alien vermin have been allowed to cross our borders unopposed, and how that sick leftist bitch Kamala (our “border czar”) did diddlysquat about it? Where the hell have you been? No one here is trying to take away your freedom of speech. There are literally hundreds of leftist and and progressive websites where you can go and spout your platitudes. By the way, if any of us tried to go to those places, we would be immediately silenced. You know that very well, but since it doesn’t fit in with your arguments here, you don’t dare mention it. The truth is this: you are not here for “discussion” and the exchange of ideas. You are here as an interloper who hopes to open up the SCP to colonization by leftists. Reply Joshua C. Frank September 1, 2024 Reading through this debate reminded me of a quote from The Boniface Option by Andrew Isker: “We cannot act like Paul on Mars Hill pointing out the altar to the unknown god in Acts 17. Globohomo [a pejorative name for leftism, from “global homogenization”] believes in nothing; it has no Areopagus, much less an altar to the unknown god. What they believe is undergirded by nothing … Instead, you must do what Jesus did when opposing those who are incapable of acting in good faith—you hold them in derision. That is Christlike.” We’ve written some poems doing just that; I say we focus on that instead of trying to persuade trolls who aren’t going to listen anyway. As the author points out, no argument works with leftists because they don’t believe in reality. I don’t mean they believe reality is something other than what it really is; I mean they reject the concept of reality itself, on the grounds that reality is whatever they want it to be (and any other concept of reality is oppressive). Hence, as the same author says, a leftist’s entire being is so thoroughly formed in opposition to Christianity that he can no more accept its truth, or any part thereof, than a vampire could tolerate garlic or a crucifix. Reply Leave a Reply Cancel ReplyYour email address will not be published.CommentName* Email* Website Captcha loading...In order to pass the CAPTCHA please enable JavaScript. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Mark Stellinga August 19, 2024 Your skills as a top-notch poet are, again, on display here, Brian. Great job, both. What a great way to consume idle hours, penning and fine-tuning works this meaningful. Isn’t it lovely to be so good at this – 🙂 Reply
Brian A. Yapko August 20, 2024 Thank you, Mark. I wish I had more idle hours to write about things I actually love. I would much rather write about moonlight and ancient ruins but the times just don’t seem to allow for it. Reply
Mark Stellinga August 21, 2024 I steal a couple hours whenever possible so I can dedicate penning time to both – like you, political pieces are definitely not my preference, but I’m driven by the same demanding obligations that you, SJB, and several other cultural warrior poets are.
Joseph S. Salemi August 19, 2024 Tim Walz is a disgrace to the United States. He chickens out of combat duty, taking retirement the minute his unit is called up, and then claims that he served under fire in combat. He pretends to have held a rank that he never attained, and then has the nerve to carry a challenge coin with that rank on it. No real soldier ever wears a decoration or rank that he did not earn by blood or valor. My father had a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a Combat Infantryman’s Badge, and his body had the German Kruppstahl in it that gave him the right to those honors. When I read about this fat Communist scumbag Walz I want to puke. As for that cackling bitch Kamala, who can’t utter a clear English sentence, you’d have to brain-dead to want her in any position of power. Reply
Brian A. Yapko August 20, 2024 Joe, I could not agree more. The Democrats have done something remarkable — they’ve produced a ticket of people so contemptible that I cannot stand to even look at them. That’s quite an achievement. And thank you for inspiring me to write the Walz poem. With the DNC dominating the news this week it seemed like a good thing to poetically call BS on him. And what you said in your comment is far more effective than what I said in rhyme! It just goes to show you that poetry does have its limits. Reply
Patricia Allred August 21, 2024 Hello, Brian! You have done it again! Like a professor, have pointed out that the current “Demented Democrats,” you have clearly underlined in bold red..a Communist’s color, the glaring errors and character defects in them, without missing a beat. I am sure you were both sneering and laughing as you created such sharp humor. Walz ought to hang out with Prince Harry! By the way, have you noticed that Walz wears a jacket far too short? Then when on stage with”Mrs Word Salad”, turns his back to the audience, jumps in the air! .At which point, the jacket crawls up his back, showing his large derriere! Yikes! He looks like a candidate on speed! And yes, Democrats live in an alternate universe! What other party kills the unborn outside the convention center or does vasectomies free of charge? Come one, come all! That 20 foot IUD was grotesque. But I looked online, and I guess it rravels to other Democratic events! Say,what.! This is a favorite poem to me, dear Brian.!The courage to callout pure nonsense is most commendable. I love writing political pieces! Especially NOW, to wake people up! Such a talent you are! Patricia Reply
Brian Yapko August 22, 2024 Thank you for this truly generous comment, Patricia! I would like to say you’re right about laughing as I created the poem but sneering is about all I could muster. And I agree — Walz does look like a candidate on speed. And with the vasectomy center and the abortion celebrations (and the unmentioned Hamas protests), I am thoroughly disgusted with the Democrats. I cringe that I ever belonged to that party. I need to take a shower.
Warren Bonham August 20, 2024 They’ve put together quite the Dream Team. You’ve masterfully and entertainingly uncovered what the DNC and the Media very much want to keep covered. Reply
Brian A. Yapko August 20, 2024 Thanks, Warren. I consider them a Nightmare Team. And am glad to pull the covers off their deceptions. If only those who will be giving a knee-jerk vote to the Democrats weren’t so gullible and ideologically-driven. Imagine if they could actually look at and weigh evidence rather than accept everything they are told to believe. Reply
Roy E. Peterson August 20, 2024 I am especially enamored with the line “he sanfranciscoed Minnesota!” They both are unfit for any office including the ones they presently occupy, yet here they are with apostate admirers. What great historical references you made that have damaged us in the past. Maybe there should be a song, “Walzing Kamala” like “Waltzing Matilda.” The cowardice of Walz is certainly manifest in every phase of this life as is the “the sense of truth” suffering in the face of lies by Harris. These are perfect accompaniments to the DNC self-love fest this week and written brilliantly. Reply
Brian A. Yapko August 20, 2024 Thank you very much indeed, Roy. I’m glad the phrasing pleased you but I regret that it is in the context of a poem which spotlights a man I consider highly dishonorable and destructive. I love your Waltzing Kamala idea for a poem. You should write it! Reply
Lannie David Brockstein August 20, 2024 The Demented Party is pretending that nobody should have a problem with Tim Walz the putz self-identifying as a combat veteran. President O’Brandon and Shrillery Clinton are pretending that the Muslim supremacist government of Iran is filled with fear, at the thought of Kamalek Hamas putting a stop to its illegal nuclear weapons program. Thank you Brian, for having shined a light on the lies of those goddamn bozos. From Lannie. P.S. Regarding the VP’s tendency to excessively repeat her sentences, the medical term for that is “palilalia”. It is a symptom of autism: Orion Kelly – That Autistic Guy – “Breaking Down Palilalia and Autism – The Connection & Causes”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5YRsaHIijE Reply
Brian A. Yapko August 20, 2024 Thank you so much, Lannie. I think you’ve hit on something with Walz’s “self-identifying” as a combat veteran. This self-identifying stuff seems to be a recurring theme among the Democrats and leftists in general. They somehow think they’ve transcended a material world where gender and race and fiscal responsibility and a dozen other have objective reality. But this is pure delusion. They’ve transcended nothing. They’ve entered a fantasy world in which all that matters is the subjective. That is all going to come crashing down sooner or later. And when it does it will take nations and security and wealth and achievement with it. And they call conservatives “mean.” Reply
Robert Lacey August 21, 2024 To be fair, Donald Trump avoided serving his country during the Vietnam War. A podiatrist in Queens, who rented office space from Trump’s father, gave him a dubious bone-spur diagnosis in 1968, right when he could have been called up. Like many other privileged young men at the time, Trump found a way to dodge the draft. Walz, on the other hand, was under no obligation to serve in the Iraq War. I don’t know if he supported the war, but it is likely that he didn’t or, at the very least, had serious reservations about it. Is there really any dishonor in leaving the National Guard after over twenty years of service when he heard that his unit might be deployed to Iraq and participate in what was an unjust war? Perhaps Trump had similar feelings about the Vietnam War… Reply
Joseph S. Salemi August 21, 2024 The doctor who allegedly made a “dubious” diagnosis is now conveniently dead and cannot be questioned. The story was told by his two daughters, who have both confessed to being ferocious anti-Trump Democrats. They gave this story to the New York Times (where else?) back in 2018, when liberals were in a particularly violent stage of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It has been resuscitated now precisely because of the revelations about Tim Walz’s lies and cowardice. Walz is now tongue-tied about his fraudulence, and the Democrats are frantically trying to save his ass. This unsubstantiated podiatrist story is a desperate attempt by Democrats to pull off a “tu quoque” fallacy. When your guy is accused of a crime, immediately blame his opponent for the same thing. Even if the story were true, it has no bearing at all on the blatant avoidance of combat duty by Tim Walz, and no bearing at all about his sheer effrontery in trying to pose as a combat veteran. Many young men escaped the Vietnam War because of small medical problems that might seem minor to us. I myself was of prime military age in 1968, and was summoned in the draft. I was not accepted for service because of poor eyesight and sinusitis, which was the sole decision of the military doctors at the examination, and no one else. Other young men were dismissed for being overweight, or underweight, or with skin conditions, or with flat feet, or with hernias. And bone spurs are fairly common among men who are good athletes, as Donald Trump always was. You might remember that Joe DiMaggio was often kept out of action as a ball player because of bone spurs in his heels. It should also be noted that from 1965 to 1970 a huge number of male baby-boomers were coming of age for military service. There were over 300 guys in the early morning medical exam that I was called for, and an afternoon exam was scheduled to handle a similar number. That meant that over 3000 men were being screened every single week. The military could afford to be very choosy about the men taken for induction. Only the strongest and healthiest were picked. Those of us who did not meet those standards were given a 1-Y deferment, which meant that we could only be called for service in a national emergency, or after an official declaration of war As for your argument that it is OK for someone to evade combat service if he has political issues with the war being fought… if that were the case, why the hell didn’t Walz quit earlier than he did, and apply for status as a Conscientious Objector? The obvious reality is that the guy wanted to have the status of a soldier as a way to grease his path into politics and get conservative votes (precisely why he has been picked by the Democrat left, to counterbalance this sick leftist bitch Kamala). You don’t join the National Guard for “twenty years of service” just to be a weekend warrior who does maneuvers in the countryside. You are in it to serve your country when your country needs you. Walz is the typical left-liberal phony — he shows off as a tough, military veteran to get votes, and hopes that nobody remembers that in actual fact he chickened out. Reply
Robert Lacey August 21, 2024 I don’t think the ad hominem attack on Harris is called for. Your use of a misogynistic slur betrays your fear of her. The polls show that, unlike Biden, she can win in November. As for her being a leftist, that’s laughable. Speaking from the left, I can assure you she is not the ideal progressive candidate we would prefer. Hardly. For most of her career she was a prosecutor who supported the punitive turn in our criminal justice system, which led to mass incarceration and the militarization of law enforcement. When she ran for president in 2020, she positioned herself as an uninspiring moderate who would not express support for any progressive policies, such as Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. She has since moved to the left to remain in step with the Democrats’ ideological shift, but her instincts are decidedly not leftist. She’s a cautious political animal who seeks the center whenever she can. But she has one thing going for her: a respect for our democratic institutions and norms which Trump and his radical supporters are eager to tear down. The true conservatives today are the Democrats, who want to preserve the American political tradition, its institutions, and the rules that govern them.
Joseph S. Salemi August 22, 2024 Like all leftists, you live in an alternate universe. You call Kamala a moderate and a centrist? Excuse me while I laugh. She’ll be moderate and centrist for as long as it takes to gain power, and then she’ll do whatever the hell she pleases. I suppose you haven’t noticed that she has so far refused to make any serious statement (as opposed to laughing, smiling, and emoting) about her position on important issues, or taken any real questions from the press. She just wants to float on a cloud of hoopla. You don’t like my language? Too damn bad. It’s not ad hominem to call out a sick leftist bitch for being precisely that. It’s purely descriptive. Also, you have carefully avoided dealing with anything that I have brought up in my post concerning Walz and military service. Perhaps it’s a subject that you’d like to avoid, in the same way that Mainstream Media avoids it.
Brian A. Yapko August 22, 2024 Mr. Lacey, we all want to be fair-minded. That is the reason we must look past propagandistic talking points and put ideology aside to actually assess things as they are and not as we fantasize them to be. I am, frankly, too old and too fat to abide being gaslit by a leftist ideologue, which — after reading this comment and your subsequent comment to Dr. Salemi — appears to be your particular bent. You want fair-minded, I’ll give you fair-minded because I’ve seen both sides of the cultural divide — far, far longer on the left than on the right. I’m a gay man who was a card-carrying Democrat for 45 years until I finally realized the extent to which I was being manipulated and used. I marched, I protested, I filed civil rights lawsuit, I did all the leftist things that were expected of me by the leftist hegemony. But over the course of the last few years, I could no longer abide being told that what I saw with my own eyes was not true. How far must a person allow himself to be gaslit without finally throwing off the yoke? I’ve read what you said with care. I reject it as the words of someone with a toxic agenda. You don’t care about the poetry here. You are here to recruit and sow division. Now I’ve been a lawyer for 35 years and I’ve seen every type of lying witness that there is. I’ve also seen every specious argument imaginable. Yours is not even interesting, and is based on false equivalence. This seems deliberate, sir, and I resent it. The poem, if you notice, is titled “Stolen Valor.” I do not recall one instance of Donald Trump pimping out fake military service in order to advance his career. I do not see Donald Trump claiming the valor of having been in combat with men who actually died or were disabled and injured for their country. I do not see Donald Trump being wrongly touted as a war hero by other politicians while he blithely beams and makes the deliberate choice not to correct them. I do not see Donald Trump accepting honors for a rank he never achieved. The more I write this the angrier I get when I consider my father who served with the U.S. Army in Germany, or Dr. Salemi’s father who was injured in service, or the countless honorable men and women I’ve known who did not whine about deployment but served when called to do so. Because they loved their country. I consider Walz so vile that it is plain to me that he is a man (or do you consider “man” a forbidden word?) so vile that only a leftist could abide him. Soldier after soldier has condemned him for not only his cowardice but for his lies. Stealing valor from people who actually earned it is despicable. If you like that, by all means vote for it. As for Kamala Harris, she was determined to be the most far-left member of the Senate in 2020. She has embraced aspects of socialism, antisemitism, defunding the police, bailing out rioters and vandals, the Squad and promoting “wokehood” (“We must stay woke, everybody.”) that you must be far left indeed to consider her a centrist. Social engineering is anathema to most sane people who have read 1984 and Brave New World. You may enjoy a good Cultural Revolution every so often, sir, but most people who value their freedoms, or who do not think like 17 year olds who have it all figured out, do not. Reply
Brian A. Yapko August 22, 2024 More than half of the veterans in the House and Senate slammed Democratic running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) on Wednesday for lying about his military career in what critics call a classic case of “stolen valor.” In a three-page memo put out by the Trump-Vance campaign, 50 veterans demanded an apology and explanation from Walz, who lied about being in combat and his rank at retirement. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/3129001/veterans-house-senate-condemn-walz-stolen-valor/ Reply
Susan Jarvis Bryant August 22, 2024 Brian, as a poet who loves a bit of hard-hitting satire to get a grave point across, your poems have delighted me. Not only do you manage to highlight the wickedness and skullduggery afoot in the circus arena of politics, you do so in tight form with excellent use of poetic devices. To pull off a villanelle as smooth and amusing as “Kamala Unburdened” (hilariously apt title) in a short space of time is to be admired. Great stuff!! Reply
Brian A. Yapko August 22, 2024 Thank you so much, Susan! I know you to be the consummate poet of hard-hitting satire so receiving this praise from you is deeply meaningful. I love your observation about “wickedness and skullduggery afoot in the circus arena of politics.” What a show that would be! Tightrope walkers, lion-tamers. And a ridiculous surfeit of clowns. I think there may be a poem in your circus conceit! I hope you run with it! Reply
Robert Lacey August 22, 2024 I DID come to this site for the poetry, and I deeply appreciate its commitment to form and tradition. I was just surprised to read overtly political verse and commentary and felt compelled to respond. I’m not a troll out to sow division or gaslight anyone. I genuinely disagree with some of you on the issues addressed here. You might be surprised to hear my conservative position on a whole host of issues. My progressivism is not born of a radical need to revolt against or tear down the establishment. I embrace progressive means (eg, strong labor unions, higher minimum wage, regulation of rapacious corporations, etc.) to achieve conservative ends (eg, social stability and unity, strong institutions and traditions that foster the commonweal, etc.). In fact, I’ve written a book about this kind of conservatism if you care to check it out. I won’t convince you to subscribe to my views, but I hope you see that I engaged here in good faith. My love for the great books, classical literature, and formal verse is what drew me to this site and organization. And I’ll continue to enjoy reading, and learning from, the poets here. Reply
Paul Freeman August 23, 2024 You’ll find there’s a certain amount of intolerance, paranoia and tag team bullying, Robert, if you’re not in lockstep on certain issues, so better to stick to non-controversial poems to comment on, then you won’t be accused of marauding. Reply
Joshua C. Frank August 24, 2024 You leftists love to portray yourselves as innocent victims of us evil right-wingers. In reality, I’ve tried joining other writing groups, but because nearly everyone there is as staunch a leftist as you guys, I ended up being on the other end of much worse than anything you’ve seen here, and for much less. You attribute what people say to you to malice, but I think it’s more a fundamental incompatibility between the two worldviews. I just saw a meme that said, “You don’t like J.K. Rowling because of the “TE” in TERF. I don’t like J.K. Rowling because of the “RF” in TERF. We are not the same.” And that’s the least of it!
Mike Bryant August 24, 2024 I believe that the largest difference between most people and the screaming one-worlders is a belief in the spiritual. Beyond that, I believe that over 90% of people understand, accept and believe that we live in a universe permeated by the spiritual. The other 10% are the materialists. A portion of that 10% has so perfectly divided so many good-hearted people that their numbers appear to be overwhelming. They are not. Their lies ARE overwhelming. And that is why they must shut down the truth and divide people along as many issues as possible. The SCP is a haven for culture, rhythm, rhyme and rapture. Whenever anyone arrives here at SCP to amplify the messages that divide people and thereby enable tyranny, I ask myself if they are the liars or the fooled. In some cases they seem to be both. Why would anyone come to SCP, one of a few small glints of light in a darkened world, to push an ideology? Yes, that is exactly what they are doing. And then, when one or two or three present another view, they claim victimhood. There are no tag teams here at SCP, Paul. Only a handful of people that reject the false promises of collectivism and are speaking out against it on a rare site that champions free speech. Brian, thank you for opening eyes and minds with your excellent poetry.
Joshua C. Frank August 24, 2024 “Why would anyone come to SCP, one of a few small glints of light in a darkened world, to push an ideology?” Because, like the Borg of the various Star Trek series, they can’t disobey their one-mind programming to stamp out the last embers of light, lest we multiply and vastly outnumber them. Our side, with its inclination toward large families, would win a fair fight by procreation alone. That’s why modern culture can’t handle a fair fight. So it connives and cheats every way it can to destroy our way as much as possible. Remember that, like the Pharisees, they are of their father the devil. Not that I’m letting the right off the hook. The right has allowed itself to be deceived into trading its birthright for a mess of pottage like Esau, to the point where even many far-right extremists are just the leftists of the Great Depression era. The nickname “cuckservatives,” meaning that conservatives have willingly allowed themselves to be cuckolded, is spot on. We don’t need conservatism, we need traditionalism.
Brian A. Yapko August 24, 2024 Mike, thank you very much for the generous comment on the poem and for your insights on our dire cultural divide. I think you have a strong point regarding spiritual versus material. I myself think of it as being evidence-based versus ideologically-based. Leftist ideologues like to claim “evidence-based” for themselves. They’re the party of science, don’t you know, along with love and tolerance — and screw you to hell if you don’t get their pronouns correct, you rotten transphobic tin-foil-hat Zionist colonizer! But I digress. Leftists (remember, I was one!) have ideologies which mask as evidence-based but they reject or trivialize any evidence that doesn’t support their preconcieved/predetermined ideology. Their ideologies are furthe premised on the peculiar (and obviously fallacious) notion that the human brain has no limitations on comprehension. For leftists, we live in a material world and so nothing else matters, from puberty blockers to euthanasia-on-demand. They have a predilection to giving great weight to evidence which is cherry-picked to support their ideology. In short, things are deemed true, in part, because they WANT them to be true. And if they are not technically true, they will MAKE them true. (How many trials I have been involved in where a battle of experts was, in reality, a battle of advocates paid for an opinion!) I’m tired of people mishandling evidence and putting their fingers on the scale to justify a particular point of view. For myself, so long as it is not obviously propagandistically-derived and we understand that human comprehension has limitations, I prefer solid, objective evidence grounded in reality and history– no fingers on the scale, no social-engineering. Let objective evidence and a dose of humility shape the ideology and not the other way around.
Joseph S. Salemi August 24, 2024 Let me inject something here. Robert Lacey may indeed have come to the SCP because he appreciates formal, traditional poetry. And I don’t think any of us here would object to that. We have a worldwide readership, and certainly there are different political views among them. The evidence that helps explain what’s going on is this. Lacey says: “I was just surprised to read overtly political verse and commentary and felt compelled to respond.” As Hamlet said, “There’s the rub.” If Lacey had found overtly political verse and commentary of a left-liberal nature at some other poetry website, he would have had no problem with it at all, and in fact it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to make any objection to it or comment about it. He would have considered it simply natural and acceptable and expected. What he was surprised at was the mere existence of rightist and conservative poems and commentary. THAT was what shocked him. It didn’t fit in with his expectations and sense of propriety. He acted like Anthony Comstock seeing a female nude. “Overtly political verse and commentary” is OK if it’s left-liberal; if it is rightist or conservative it is upsetting. This is one major difference between censorship in the old Soviet Union, and the utterly intrusive mind-control that dominates left-liberal opinion today. When someone pointed out to Stalin in the 1930s that there was an obscure magazine being published in Russia that was still pro-Czarist, he replied “So what? They’re just a small group with no power and influence, with a tiny readership. Leave them alone.” But today, ANY expression of rightist or conservative opinion, no matter how small or niche-market in appeal, sets the left off like a bomb. They are amazed to see it, and they are impelled to attack it. If Lacey had simply appreciated the poetry here, devoting his attention to aesthetics and metrical issues, there would have been no fight. But he was “surprised,” and “compelled to respond.” When he gets blasted in return, he feels himself a victim — a sacrosanct status for anyone who is a left-liberal today.
Joseph S. Salemi August 22, 2024 Ah, how predictable. When an admitted leftist is called out, he slips back — chameleon-like — into the protective coloration of a “progressive” working for unimpeachable goals. This is why Lenin called soft-focus liberals “useful idiots.” Reply
Robert Lacey August 22, 2024 I never said I was a leftist. I said I was on the left. There’s a difference. I doubt this will persuade you that I’m anything but an unwitting pawn of the Marxist-Leninist left, but this piece succinctly captures what I tried to do with my larger project. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/churchills-compassionate-conservatism/ Reply
Joseph S. Salemi August 22, 2024 OK, so you’re a man of the left pretending to be a staunch defender of order and tradition. No wonder your heroes are Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Peter Viereck — the three champions of the elite over the common man.
Joshua C. Frank August 23, 2024 Why do we bother dignifying anything these leftist marauders say with a response? It seems to me, more and more, that doing this is just buying into their game and their rules. The very foundations of their ideas of what’s right and wrong are in direct opposition to ours, to say the least, and we will no more change their minds than they will change ours. At this point, there’s nothing left to do but ridicule them in our poems, as is being done in “Kamala Unburdened.”
Margaret Coats August 23, 2024 In three years of active-duty regular Army service at a post well supplied with general officers, I never encountered a sergeant major. Having reached the lowest non-commissioned rank of buck sergeant, I had to be scrupulous about minor things like burning bags of classified trash or good company order marching in holiday parades. Those at the top non-commissioned rank of sergeant major, even today, have a reputation as strident sticklers for military honors, customs, and courtesies, so much so that adjustment to civilian life on retirement is difficult. It seems Master Sergeant Walz was not the type to make the grade. Reply
Brian A. Yapko August 23, 2024 Thank you for reading and commenting, Margaret. Thank you as well for your service to our country! Your experience in the Army gives considerable weight to your criticism of Walz. Reply
Joshua C. Frank August 23, 2024 Brian, these are great! I know everything I need to about Walz thanks to the first poem (my favorite line is, “He’s blindly sanfranciscoed Minnesota,” though I can’t help but wonder whether his doing so was actually intentional given leftists’ desire to assimilate and ruin the whole world), and the second really made me laugh because it’s all so true! Reply
Brian A. Yapko August 24, 2024 Thank you so much, Josh! Normally I would hate to reduce a politician down to the lines of a poem but here I feel I’ve actually elevated Walz more than he deserves. You’re probably right about the “blindly” part. His actions seem deliberate rather than negligent. I may have to change it to “blithely.” I’ll let Mike know if I decide to change it. Good eye! Reply
Robert Lacey August 31, 2024 Oh, I’m not a victim, and I never said I was. Go back and check the thread. I’m doing just fine. If anyone is playing the victim here, it’s those of you who have accused me of being a “leftist marauder” who wants to “recruit and sow division” and “push an ideology,” a champion of elitism who wants to rule over “the common man.” Seething with hatred and resentment, you reveal yourselves. You are the ones who feel threatened and therefore compelled to lash out at someone whose only sin was to question the characterization of Walz as a communist and a coward and Harris as a “sick leftist bitch.” I wasn’t “upset.” I merely disagreed with your unsubstantiated assertions and indecorous language. Listen: If I’m the marauder eager to stage a cultural revolution in this story, which clearly means I’m the villain, who’s the self-proclaimed victim here? The tone of many posts written in this thread reflects the psychology of the “ascetic priest” about whom Nietzsche warned in “The Genealogy of Morals”: “I suffer: someone must be to blame for it.” Political extremists of all kinds (i.e., ideologues) are quick to traffic in the politics of victimhood and blame, resentment and recrimination, and bring an end to any hope of discussion. Now, as for my initial reaction to “Stolen Valor,” if you’re going to write verse that makes a political statement, it’s not unreasonable for someone to respond to more than just the aesthetics. As much as I enjoy formal poetry, what makes a poem goes well beyond meter and rhyme. I don’t say this to disparage Mr. Yapko’s work. He’s clearly an accomplished poet. This just doesn’t happen to be his best work. Angry reactions to political events rarely produce worthwhile art. So, yeah, I’m doing quite fine. You are the angry ones. Indeed, your hysteria smacks of a rather bizarre neo-McCarthyism. Peter Viereck wrote, “McCarthyism was the revenge of the noses that for years were pressed against the outside windowpane while Marie Antoinette danced.” Of all the haters in this world, among the greatest are the declassed intellectuals. As far as I can tell, though, there are no real victims here. None of us should be that angry or resentful. After all, we enjoy the privilege of cultivating our poetic sensibilities. What a gift! But I see reason to be disappointed, even despairing. I am disappointed with how this thread has unfolded because I see a missed opportunity for fruitful dialogue, which impoverishes us all. I, too, share the traditionalist concerns about the disenchantment and deracination that the acids of modernity have wrought. I, too, fear the encroachments of technology on what we see as “the human.” I, too, worry about social atomization and the disappearance of rooted communities. I may not agree with your solution to these problems, particularly the reactionary impulse to restore some mythic past, but I share many of your deep concerns. I envision an edifying discussion if everyone removed his ideological blinders. And, yes, I include myself when I say “everyone.” Sadly, the only thing you “victims” can see is a communist marauder, a godless materialist bent on bringing darkness to your American pastoral. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi August 31, 2024 Lacey, you can play that plangent violin of mild-mannered and decorous liberalism at other websites, but you can’t play it here. We’ve been red-pilled against it. How typical of you to quote Viereck, the fake conservative and anti-populist who wanted elite control over everything. It’s the same old aristocratic attitude: we can maintain everything nice and comfy as long as we keep the rednecks down. You’re a confessed man of the left, but you still “share our concerns” and our “worries,” and you want “fruitful dialogue and “edifying discussion.” Do you have any idea how sickening that kind of mealy-mouthed, epicene rhetoric sounds to us? We don’t want to talk to you. We have heard enough pious left-liberal claptrap and lies as you try to create cover for the slow erosion of our rights and our identity by your allies on the left. Yes, your allies. When push comes to shove, you will vote with them. You call us “hateful” and “resentful”? Why don’t you take a good hard look at your friends and allies on the left, and tell us what you see there? Do both yourself and us a favor, and get lost. Reply
Robert Lacey September 1, 2024 Thanks for proving my point. I didn’t want to be right, but there’s some recompense to be found there, I suppose. As for the erosion of your rights, you seem perfectly at liberty to say what you want on this site. I think that’s a good thing. And most Democratic leaders would agree. I don’t see Biden’s secret police coming after you at any rate. Unfortunately, when you say my comments aren’t welcome (“We don’t want to talk to you”) and tell me to leave the site (“get lost”), you make it clear that you have no interest in extending those rights to someone with whom you disagree. Too bad. I’m genuinely interested in what you and others in this thread have to say, especially about the threats to liberty that Democrats supposedly pose. I am curious to hear what you think is at stake here. What have you suffered during eight years of Obama and almost four of Biden? Is it possible you’re raging against the wrong thing? Leftism isn’t your bogeyman. It’s modernity. And we have all suffered from it to varying degrees. Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, you condemn the Crystal Palace, which represents in his eyes the culmination of the scientific project to create a utopia by turning people into perfectly predictable stimulus-response mechanisms and thereby stripping them of their humanity. Our humanity, he says, comes from the fundamental freedom to choose and make mistakes. Science and technology promise happiness but threaten to turn each of us into an “organ stop.” This is a fear on which the right does not have a monopoly. As I tell my students, there is an Underground Man in all of us. He represents the inextinguishable human desire for freedom, even if holding on to it demands what the champions of science and reason consider deeply irrational behavior. But people on the left do not think that this legitimate fear necessitates giving up on human ingenuity when it devises viable ways of providing health care to everyone who needs it, addressing the savage inequalities in our education system, feeding and housing the poor and dispossessed, regulating rapacious corporations, strengthening the collective bargaining rights of workers, etc. I am far more concerned about corporate behemoths using big data and sophisticated algorithms, which threaten to curb my freedom and turn me into an “organ stop,” than I am about the collectivist state. For you, it’s the opposite. But we share a deep concern about modernity. Isn’t that sufficient common ground on which a productive discussion can be built? Aristotle said virtue can be found in the mean between excess and deficiency. We must call on human expertise to solve problems when we can, but also humbly recognize that not everything can be fixed in this imperfect world and that our hubris can make things worse if we’re not careful. You think the left is guilty of excess. It certainly has been in its worst moments. Ideologues of all stripes tend toward overreach. But the right has committed the equally harmful sin of deficiency. Let’s find agreement, however tentative, in the Aristotelian mean.
Brian A. Yapko September 1, 2024 Mr. Lacey, I’m not sure where to begin with your comments both to me and to Dr. Salemi. You present the appearance of wanting to have a fair dialogue, but you do not give any indication of meaning it. Fair dialogue, to you, seems to mean that if we don’t agree with your point of view we are claiming victimhood. Well, that’s rich coming from the Left when it is they who have turned claiming victimhood into an art-form and using it as a springboard for the most appalling bullying, including but not limited to causes ranging from Defund the Police, DEI, BLM, the attack of the Transgender Hegemony, the attack on religion, the attack on Jews, all the way to attacks on anyone who doesn’t think along leftist woke politburo lines. You talk about attacks on free speech but it is the Left which has made it well-nigh impossible for conservative viewpoints to be disseminated (even Mark Zuckerberg has come clean on the pressure put upon Facebook by Democrats.) Every sensible comment regarding transgender overreach is labeled “hate-speech” and either gets you in Facebook jail or buried so that nothing is ever seen. Every sensible comment opposing slavery reparations for people who were never slaves in states which never had slaves paid for by people who never were slaves gets labeled “hate-speech.” Sensible criticism of Joe Biden and his mental state was slandered as “cheap fake.” Leftist points of view dominate in every sense of the word the media, and that includes poetry sites. I happen to be a gay man who writes poetry. Well, you’d think a gay poet would be able to get published in any poetry journal, but this is not so. I have been canceled by left-leaning journal after journal – BUT ONLY after I came out as someone who opposes Transgender overreach and who now identifies as a conservative. After being feted as a new LBGT voice (when they thought I lived under the rainbow and was a Democrat), I now cannot get a poem published other than on SCP because of my political convictions – convictions, incidentally, which were mainstream Democrat centrist only 15 years ago. I’ve already explained my history as a 45 year Democrat who finally became left the Democrat party because I was tired of gaslighting. But the overwhelming impetus was what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023 and the fact that there was an eruption of support after that date – FOR THE TERRORISTS. And that eruption of hate was either approved of, or ignored by the entire Democrat party, including people like Tlaib, Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, but also not condemned by Biden or Harris. I’m not a suicidal man, Mr. Lacy. I don’t support a party that wants to see me and my family dead. So you wonder what is it that has been lost under 8 years of Obama and 4 years of Biden? That’s a good place to start. My security. My ability to express myself as a conservative. My ability to express myself as a man of Jewish extraction without getting a swastika drawn on my house. My ability to get a poem published in a journal that normally celebrates the gay experience (but apparently only if you’re liberal.) My ability to rely on the police in the context of their being reviled and defunded. My ability to advocate for gay children who are being routinely misidentified as transgender so that an entire generation of gay people is getting wiped out. My ability to worship with my faith being mocked. My ability to read and understand a history which doesn’t continually get rewritten. My ability to enjoy a historic statue without it being defaced by people who hate this country. I won’t even touch on subjects like the economy, immigration, or other hot-button issues. You want to know why I act as if the culture war has personal application to me? Because it does. But that being said, I don’t like your condescending tone. You come across as someone who says “well, I’ve never been discriminated against, ergo there is no discrimination.” “I’ve never been the victim of a crime, ergo there’s no problem with crime.” “I had breakfast this morning, ergo there’s no hunger elsewhere in the world.” You are clearly an intelligent person and an accomplished one. But you have fallen in love with your own arguments and ability to reason. I know this from your condescension. I know this because I recognize the difference between an idealist which you may have been once and an ideologue, which is the frontier I believe you have crossed into. For what it’s worth, I do appreciate your recognition of my poetry in general and I share your view that this is not one of my best. It’s most definitely not. It’s an opinion piece set to rhyme and I wrote it the night before it was published. But I felt my viewpoint needed to be shared. I shared it, you shared your reservations about it and I would have hoped that this would be the end of it. You know, you are always free to write a poem of your own and get it published rather than continuing to glom onto mine. I’m not going to tell you not to show up at this site. I don’t have that authority. But I do know that if I showed up at 99 out of 100 poetry sites and started explaining to the leftist leaning poets and readers there why they should pay more attention to reasonable conservatives, I would receive more hate that you can imagine. Have, in fact. And, morever, such an experience occurred not long ago on a site in which a regular SCP poet dared to criticize the quality of Amanda Gorman’s poetry. It erupted into a conservative-bashing hate-fest that turned personal and frightening. “How dare you, you racist colonial jerk?” That’s what we get now for stating a non-racist, defensible position that doesn’t align with the woke hegemony. We have basically one conservative poetry site and you can’t even leave that to us. Instead of commenting and moving-on, you chose to engage, pontificate and argue. That doesn’t sound to me like you’re here for the poetry. Your words may say you want a dialogue, but your actions indicate that you want to colonize and convert. We’re dazzled by your reasoning abilities and your fair-mindedness. But these are fractious times and it is hard for me to understand your insistence on debate. This isn’t Facebook. By analogy, why would you make a point of attending the Republican National Convention only to argue Democrat talking points? You’d have that right, of course, but your expectation of winning converts and popularity contests would be both naive and intrusively belligerent. Reply
Robert Lacey September 1, 2024 Thank you for this response. I appreciate your taking the time to express your thoughts. I apologize for my condescending tone. I will give it a rest. I had no intention of converting anyone, btw. I do not have such faith in my powers of persuasion. For what it’s worth, I hope this discussion, however fraught, convinces you that not all people on the left are on an ideological crusade, eager to cancel or demonize those on the right. I teach political theory and have turned to writing poetry only recently (a little over two years ago?) in part to escape politics and the fractured world you mentioned. I discovered this site quite by accident and have happily learned more about meter and different ways of constructing formal poetry. I’ll return to being an invisible reader. Thank you.
Joseph S. Salemi September 1, 2024 Lacey, when you say “productive discussion” you mean this: Left-liberals lecture us and orate, while we listen, ask a few timid questions, and then agree with what left-liberals say. That’s not a discussion. That’s a sermon. Are you so intellectually blind that you haven’t noticed the almost absolute control that people of your ilk exercise over Mainstream Media, both on-air and in print? Where’s the “productive discussion” in that? When you say “let’s find agreement, however tentative,” that is pure effrontery on your part. Everything that the left does is designed not “find agreement” but to gain power, and to impose it unilaterally on those who oppose them. Have you been to Canada? Have you followed the news about the complete collapse of free speech in the United Kingdom? Have you read of how the governments of both France and Germany have used every illegal method they can find to suppress the vote of rightists? Have you watched how (for the same purpose of suppressing the conservative vote) over ten million illegal alien vermin have been allowed to cross our borders unopposed, and how that sick leftist bitch Kamala (our “border czar”) did diddlysquat about it? Where the hell have you been? No one here is trying to take away your freedom of speech. There are literally hundreds of leftist and and progressive websites where you can go and spout your platitudes. By the way, if any of us tried to go to those places, we would be immediately silenced. You know that very well, but since it doesn’t fit in with your arguments here, you don’t dare mention it. The truth is this: you are not here for “discussion” and the exchange of ideas. You are here as an interloper who hopes to open up the SCP to colonization by leftists. Reply
Joshua C. Frank September 1, 2024 Reading through this debate reminded me of a quote from The Boniface Option by Andrew Isker: “We cannot act like Paul on Mars Hill pointing out the altar to the unknown god in Acts 17. Globohomo [a pejorative name for leftism, from “global homogenization”] believes in nothing; it has no Areopagus, much less an altar to the unknown god. What they believe is undergirded by nothing … Instead, you must do what Jesus did when opposing those who are incapable of acting in good faith—you hold them in derision. That is Christlike.” We’ve written some poems doing just that; I say we focus on that instead of trying to persuade trolls who aren’t going to listen anyway. As the author points out, no argument works with leftists because they don’t believe in reality. I don’t mean they believe reality is something other than what it really is; I mean they reject the concept of reality itself, on the grounds that reality is whatever they want it to be (and any other concept of reality is oppressive). Hence, as the same author says, a leftist’s entire being is so thoroughly formed in opposition to Christianity that he can no more accept its truth, or any part thereof, than a vampire could tolerate garlic or a crucifix. Reply
