A poem of the future, looking back at us
This is by reader James M.:
STEEPLE ON A BASEMENT
They withhold tribute from my wage,
Indoctrinate my son.
My wife and daughters wear hijabs
Until the planting’s done.
The bus accepts me once a week,
Its dhimmi strobe is pink.
I keep my head down in the stores
And rarely ever speak.
And I know
That you can’t put a steeple on a basement.
But we’ve got a cemetery
We can call our own;
I guess that I’m just reaping what
My grandfather had sown.
Our history has been washed clean.
Books were turned to ash.
Pillars of our race and culture
Came down in a flash.
I’ve heard of greatness we once owned,
Wonders we had made.
Within our welcoming embrace
They took it all away.
And I know
That you can’t put a steeple on a basement.
In this unfavored land we dwell,
There’s no green on our clothes;
I guess we’ve just inherited
What our ancestors chose.
We live beneath the crescent, bathed
In sickly dimming light.
Would that those before us could
Have had the will to fight.
- end of initial entry -
LA to James M2:
I like it. Is it a take-off on something or an original work?
James replies:
It’s an original work.
It was inspired by your discussion with (if I remember correctly) Phillip M. on the dearth of conservative art. I got to thinking about my shelf full of leftist punk rock CDs from my teen and college years, which I haven’t parted with due to sentimental reasons but also can’t bear to listen to any more, and how I wish there were modern music written about the things I now care about. (It’s funny, when I was a kid in suburbia with no reason to be angry at anything, my silly music got me upset through its silly liberal ideas that I wouldn’t have had otherwise, and now as an adult I’m upset and even scared about things that actually threaten myself and my family and there’s no music to make me feel less alone.) So I decided I would try to write a song and those are the lyrics, shuffled a bit into a poem format.
November 17
Clark Coleman writes:
Nice poem
Jordan writes:
“Steeple on a Basement” was interesting, but more interesting to me was James M.’s comments regarding his “shelf full of leftist punk rock CDs from my teen and college years.” As a former punk kid from Los Angeles, I have a similar shelf I’m guessing. I would appreciate it if you could put me in contact with James as I’m guessing we have a lot in common. It’s really amazing to me that so many former punks have ended up in what I call the “hard right.” But, on reflection, I guess it shouldn’t be. Despite its later reputation and eventual commercialization, the early punk movement in the U.S. was really a reaction against the Boomer ethos, its music, its complacency, its self-regard and its emptiness of spirit. Punk brought with it a “do it yourself” ethos in which people were encouraged to make their own music and, more importantly, to think for themselves. While this young spirit naturally found the left-wing a natural home, as it has aged this almost instinctual dislike of anything to do with the 1960s (as Boomers understand that term) combined with the spirit to “question authority” in word and deed has led many old punks to the right in one form or another.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 16, 2009 09:24 PM | Send