'MANDATE MY ASS!'
Maybe it stems from my thinking, these last few days, about the relationships among American poetry and politics and Presidential inaugurations. Whatever the cause, I found myself with the great good fortune of listening to “B-movie,” Gil Scott-Heron’s massive 1981 excoriation of the America of President Ronald “Ray-gun,” as Scott-Heron delightfully, scathingly, rhythmically pronounces the name of our 40th President.
It’s a great refreshment to hear GSH’s piece, especially after taking in Amanda Gorman’s soft, sweet, cotton-candy-like inaugural poem—which, I’ll hasten to add, satisfied so many of us by providing a vehicle to celebrate the great relief from the pure nausea, anxiety, and sleeplessness of four years of Trump that the formal ascendancy of Joe Biden represents.
But “B-movie” demonstrates that really incisive, rigorous, danceable [!], and enduring political poetry has and can be written and performed in this country. Backed by infectious, funky rhythm sections, Scott-Heron’s poems dive deep into the nation’s popular culture and surface with slashing, memorable indictments of our country’s intellectually flabby, self-satisfied, and selfish mindset.
No one was better—Scott-Heron died in 2011 at age 62—at ridiculing the hype of television commercials, movies, and marketing by juxtaposing pungent references to them with the urgent priorities of real people. “The revolution will not go better with Coke,” he wrote in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” his relentless 1970 masterpiece. “The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath.” While Heron was masterful in taking down the likes of Nixon (in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”) and Reagan (in “B-movie”), his satiric vision encompassed much broader vistas.
“Well, the first thing I want to say is: Mandate my ass!” True, GSH’s opening salvo is aimed directly at the Reagan Administration, especially its contention that what in reality was a small part of the electorate gave it the authority to enact its radical Conservative agenda. The poet’s attack is buttressed by statistics—a rare but welcome presence in a poem—that he raps out expertly: “we've been convinced that 26% of the registered voters, not even 26% of the American people, but 26% of the registered voters form a mandate or a landslide.”
Bitingly, GSH immediately goes on to stress the flimsy characters and false claims to power of Reagan and his vice president George H.W. Bush, who ran against him in the primary and went by the hilariously trivializing nickname of “Skippy”: “21% voted for Skippy and 3, 4% voted for somebody else who might have been running.” Someone not worth remembering, to be sure.
From here, the ridicule moves to the insubstantiality of Reagan, the chameleon-like Hollywood actor who, GSH avers, slid with strange ease (Hollyweird) from a leftish role as president of the Screen Actors Guide to the far right as California Governor and U.S. President. Reagan:
Acted like an actor.
Hollyweird.
Acted like a liberal.
Acted like General Franco when he acted like governor of California, then he acted like a Republican.
Then he acted like somebody was going to vote for him for president.
Then, chillingly, the poet accuses everyone, including himself, of complicity in our hollow politics: “We're all actors in this I suppose.” How had we come to this pass? His diagnosis, exactly 40 years ago, was that “this country wants nostalgia,” that its people “want to go back as far as they can — even if it's only as far as last week.” Four years ago, someone in a ridiculous red cap claiming to Make America Great Again tapped into a similar vein of “no-stalgia,” as GHS pertinently pronounces the word.
Now that’s a poem for Inauguration Day.
Photo Credit: "Gil Scott-Heron" by Stuart Madeley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0