Last Saturday, while marching down Market Street with hundreds of other San Franciscans who agree there should be “No Kings” in America, I was handed a leaflet by a representative of the “Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary.” Given the lengthy title of the leaflet’s group, I can see why it prefers to call itself BAMN.
After deciphering BAMN’s abbreviation (“By Any Means Necessary”), I found myself intrigued by the leaflet’s description of “certain major billionaires,” men BAMN sees as “would-be Caligulas and Neros of capital” seeking “a permanent opportunity for an orgy of greed.” There’s some poetry in this anti-capitalist critique.
You may doubt my seriousness here, as I am about to quote a great satirist. But BAMN’s comparison of Trump-era billionaires to ancient Roman rulers and their orgy of greed inspired me to re-read satiric poetry written in the first century A.D. by Juvenal about Emperor Nero’s society. In one of his poems, Juvenal reports that a Roman named Umbricius “has much on his mind,’ and the poet then lets us hear Umbricius ask himself:
What should I do in Rome? I am no good at lying.
… I can’t hire out as assassin,…
I am no lookout for thieves, so I cannot expect a commission
On some governor’s staff….
Who has a pull these days, except your yes men and stooges
With blackmail in their hearts, yet smart enough to keep silent?
In other words, Umbricius is too honest and upright to thrive in Nero’s empire. The satiric lines written in Latin by Juvenal and translated into English by Rolf Humphries might be adapted to describe a contemporary scene. I am no Juvenal or Humphries, but I can imagine a poet writing lines in which a young American in Washington, DC asks himself:
What am I doing in this ballroom? I’m no good at lying.
I’m not even qualified to be a White House press secretary.
(Even the best of them don’t last long.)
A slip of the tongue, a momentary lapse
and I might use the forbidden words
speak of “climate change” or “diversity” or “human rights.”
This city is a place for yes men and agreeable women
Willing to sign the President’s nondisclosure agreement
Stay silent or flatter him and you’ll dine on sesame crusted sea bass with baby bok
choy, roasted eggplant, and sauce verte, at a banquet with the ruler of China and
Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Mark
Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, David Ellison, Michael Dell, Jamie Dimon,
all the President’s men, with Vanilla crémeux, White House honey ice cream,
and a no-bid government contract for dessert.
End of poetic fragment. I’m saving the orgy for a later installment. The segment here is far less outrageous than Juvenal’s complaints would have been in his day, in part because what once would have been a scandal involving luxury, corruption and chicanery has been normalized, that is to say, Trumpified.
If anyone runs across (or reads) a new Juvenal, who writes his satires in English instead of Latin, please let me know. I’m looking for a poet who has been roaming (at least in his or her or their imagination) the halls of Congress, sat through lavish White House dinners with billionaires, knows their deals in cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, and saw the President play golf while his bombs destroyed family homes in Gaza, all topics suitable for a long poem about life under the new Nero.
Will the new Juvenal please step forward and write about this “orgy of greed”?
Without knowing it, the late Allen Ginsberg auditioned for the job in some of his poems. He wrote some stanzas that mocked those in America’s highest echelons. One of his responses to corruption and wealth was a song that warned:
Stay away from the White House
Stay away I wish you well
Stay away from the White House
Or you’ll go to Vajra Hell
Stay away from New York City
It costs money to live there
Stay away from the country
The banks own all the air
I could be wrong, we may not need a new Juvenal or a new Ginsberg. The old ones and their original poetry still offer some wonderful comic and aggrieved responses to injustice, malfeasance and the American way.
_______________________________
Joel Schechter has written several books about satire.
