Liberal Hate America Poetry Class 101
By Tatiana Menaker
February 23, 2004
While Americans and Iraqis cheered when Saddam Hussein was dragged from
his spider hole in December, there were, obviously, a few notable
exceptions. While Saddam loyalists and anti-American Arabs pouted in
gloom and doom, back in the U.S. an anti-American poetry hit parade,
entitled "My America," was held shortly after Saddam's capture.
It was the grand finale of San Francisco State University's fall
semester.
Even as TV screens showed the captured Hitler of the Middle East in all
his pathetic, unkempt glory, the anti-war show on campus continued. As
a part of the Creative Writing Department curriculum, more than a
hundred and fifty SFSU students were forced to attend this collective
primary delusion presented as a poetry reading. Unfortunately, the
weakness of the poets' political intellect was matched by the
weakness of their writing. From the lighted stage of the huge
auditorium they groaned about American 'war atrocities':
"'Shock and Awe' is to say: In forty-eight hours, several
thousand dead, battered, incinerated, shattered..."
They also wailed about an American fighter plane downed only in their
sick imaginations:
"Strewn across the desert: some boots, a medal, a map of Iraq..."
American soldiers were declared to be gleeful murderers and trigger
pullers:
"This is your brain on trigger.
Trigger.
Happy, happy trigger
Pull. Pull.
Thank you, Mr. Bush, for my new arms.
Death bubbles."
And exulted in a full-blown parade of anti-American delirium:
"When we know someone is suffering somewhere just so we can be
relaxed and tranquil in America, Bully of Planet Earth, Superpower."
In addition, environmental Green and anti-Globalization rhetoric was
served behind the mask of poetry:
"Do you see a Statue of Liberty or do you see a toxic waste dump?"
Actually, some individual confessions were not so bad. Listening to
this poetry, who would doubt that:
"My mom was a beatnik, therefore crazy.
My father was absent in the neck of a bottle."
Or:
"I'm a little pissed at America right now..."
Clearly understanding that I was heading toward an F in this class, I
took off on a suicide mission. I approached the lit stage where these
"poets" sat warmed by applause and proudly waiting for more
compliments.
"Don't you think," I asked, "it is pathetic to perform in this
anti-war circus now that Saddam has been captured? How do you feel
about his capture?"
"It's great that they got him," one of the guys on the stage
answered.
"But how," I asked, "could it have happened without a war?"
The instructor flew at me like a vulture, "Tatiana! Stop this
immediately!"
He already knew my ways; I had had a few words with him regarding his
anti-American attitude.
"Don't try to shut me up! You guys are such conformists. No courage
to be dissidents even for a change. Go and study accounting! Your
poetry sucks!"
Later, registering for the spring semester, I realized that almost all
the "poets" on the auditorium stage were the Creative Writing
department's poetry teachers. While nothing at SFSU surprises me
anymore, I exploded, and I need to explain why. The "My [Hate For]
America" poetry parade overcame my ability to restrain myself.
Throughout the fall semester the "Writers on Writing" class
desecrated two things I hold dear: literature and America. It was a
constant assault on my dedication to literature and my literary taste,
and an insult to my love for this country. Not only were we forced to
buy a bag of crappy books (except a few) with a price tag of around
$200, but almost all these "writers" and "poets" presented on
the lighted stage of the huge auditorium week after week used the
opportunity to express their hate and contempt for America. Throughout
the semester only a few talented exceptions abstained from expressing
their political opinions.
If I have expertise in anything in this life, it is literature. I came
from the Soviet Union, where literature, especially poetry, was a
serious and deadly business. The second national prize for poetry in
the USSR was five years in prison. The first prize was a death
sentence, as seen by the fates of Nikolai Gumilev (execution by firing
squad) and Osip Mandelshtam (a hungry death in the Gulag).
Night after night we typed for Samizdat (underground press) on
primitive typewriters the smuggled poems of my friend Igor Guberman,
who had been sentenced to five years in a prison camp. Kneeling on all
fours (I was so pregnant at the time that I couldn't sit), I read a
book by Nadezhda Mandelshtam-the widow of the executed poet-that
was brought into the country as contraband by some brave foreign
visitors. The possession of this book was an offense punishable by law.
The hostess begged me to leave, scared that I would go into labor right
there in her apartment, but I finished that book understanding that
this was my only chance to touch this dangerous copy.
My Leningrad neighbor Joseph Brodsky, a literary genius and one of the
best Russian poets of the 20th century, was, like Solzhenitsyn, thrown
out of the country. At the age of 33, Brodsky came to the US,
struggling with every English sentence he attempted to write. But by
1987, after only fifteen years in the US, he had been awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature for his essays in English. He also served as Poet
Laureate of the United States in 1991 and 1992. When I asked him about
the tragedy of the =E9migr=E9 writer who is deprived of his mother
tongue, he answered acidly, "Who told you that you can write only in
Cyrillic?"
Brodsky died a premature death a few years ago. His heart just gave up:
while living in the US, he still was tortured by the KGB, who made him
helpless to prevent the suffering of his elderly parents left behind in
Russia. The Soviet government took away their meager pensions, earned
by forty years of work. Then the officials sadistically announced that
his parents would never see their only son again. The Soviets kept
their word and Brodsky started to hate even the Russian language
because it became the language in which his parents had been subjected
to persecution.
Joseph Brodsky knew the value of freedom as only a former slave could.
Brodsky's Nobel-winning essays, "In a Room and a Half" and "On
Tyranny," included in the book dedicated to his mother and father,
should be required reading in all university creative writing classes,
so that future writers will see the price people paid for the luxury to
write and read in other countries and will appreciate their creative
freedom and America itself.
There were so many talented writers and poets imprisoned and murdered
in the Soviet Union that it is easier to count those who by some
miracle were able to remain alive and well. Through his own life and
prison camp experience, as through the experiences of his friends,
Brodsky learned a lot about evil.
In a commencement address given by Brodsky in 1984 at Williams College,
he pronounced:
"No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be in the course
of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with
what's known as Evil...For the most interesting thing about Evil is
that it is wholly human. To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and
worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social
justice, civic conscience, a better future, etc."
This country gave him refuge and freedom, as it did for many less
talented people, including me. For people like us, the name of America
is sacred.
In those dark Soviet decades, cramped in the dusty communal apartments,
surrounded by distorted mirrors of socialist propaganda, we knew that
America existed. The smuggled pair of American jeans or the Simon and
Garfunkel record was, for us, a symbol of civilization and freedom. We
would go to suburban forests to listen to the "Voice of America" on
short wave radios. The Soviets jammed it in the cities and spent more
money on suppressing American radio than they spent on all their own
broadcasting.
The mere existence of America gave us the courage to fight. Some people
who just wanted to leave the Soviet Union paid with prison sentences
just for declaring a desire to leave the paradise surrounded by barbed
wire and armed guards shooting escapees in the back. The escapees
didn't want to take anything with them. They just dreamed of
departing, even naked, with their children on their shoulders. They
hijacked airplanes, invented air balloons which evaded radar, swam at
night from the beaches of the Black Sea or jumped from the stage during
concert tours as Baryshnikov and Makarova did. The Socialist empire
didn't want to lose its main property: its slaves. (Listen, you
"poets," dreaming about socialism!)
Finally, it was America that paid our way out. The Jackson-Vanik
amendment forced the Soviets to allow some groups to emigrate in
exchange for a cheap grain trade agreement. Jews were the bargaining
chip when the USSR was on the edge of starvation.
Divided by the number of people they finally let go, how many kilos of
grain were paid for me? Or my mother? What was the price in grain for
the Moscow boy who became a student at Stanford and invented Google? Or
another boy, who became the managing editor of this magazine? Or for
the Russian taxi
driver? Or for the elderly Jew, who worked all his life for the
Soviets and was allowed, like everyone else, to take with him only $90
after paying five months' salary for renouncing his Soviet
citizenship?
America, this great and generous country not only gave all of us
refuge; it even paid to buy us out of slavery.
When I see these Lilliputians attacking the noble and generous Gulliver
called America, I lose my breath with fury. The attacks of these
literary dwarfs on this country feel personal, against me and my
safety. It was not without reason that the great American actress Bette
Davis, upon being asked for major life advice, spat the answer,
"Beware of Lilliputians!" She knew what they were capable of.
"If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well"
stated Joseph Brodsky. He started his Nobel Lecture with the words:
"[I]t is better to be a total failure in a democracy than a martyr,
or la cr=E8me de la cr=E8me in a tyranny." Our university poetry
teachers don't understand how lucky they are to be failures in a
democracy. They have failed in their main obligation to write well. In
the Soviet Union they wouldn't receive even one week in prison.
At least once a year every immigrant from the Soviet Union has the same
nightmare: he or she is trapped back in the old country and can't
escape. Ironically enough, mine takes place at San Francisco State. I
am walking down the empty hall of the Humanities building. The doors of
the stuffy rooms are open, and from all the classes, the same words can
be heard:
"Colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, exploitation of the working
class."
And again:
"Colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, exploitation of the working
class."
I see the trusting faces of the young students.
"What class is this?" I ask.
"Philosophy," they answer.
Please, tell me I am not back in the Soviet Union again and this is
just a nightmare!
--
Left-wing liberals are EVERYTHING they accuse the right of being. They
are mean, vicious, hateful, greedy, cold-hearted, closed-minded,
selfish, intolerant, bigoted and racist.
Liberals HATE America!
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