After 9/11, I shifted in political allegiance from social liberalism, believing in big government and enlarging the public sector and welfare, to conservativism, believing in individualism, enlarging personal liberty and the free markets, wanting to reduce the reach and power of big government. I had reasons, not just motivations, for this shift in philosophies, but I expressed the shift primarily in political verse, not in disquisitions of political philosophy.
I wrote several long plays, and a third, left yet unfinished, to provide the vehicles for political verse. I wanted to write poems of public rhetoric, Shakespearean in inspiration, for recitation in public assembly.
The results are several long poems, below. I think I successfully conveyed the political chaos, e.g., riots in the streets by welfare dependents in Europe, that has come to pass.
Sarah and Louise's How and When Speech
From "Restoration (Tractor)"
The play is set in rural West Virginia, where evacuees from New York City have been sent by the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist nuclear strike on New York. The nation's politics are in chaos. Sarah and Louise, both young women, become political leaders. They successfully enlist the support a club of middle aged men who restore steam locomotives, convincing them that America needs a new government built on a new society. The club members ask, who are the persons to undertake such a profound mission and when is the right moment to do so. The speeches answer these questions. The speeches interweave quotations by Thomas Jefferson (stanzas followed by asterisks) with speeches composed by the playwright. (Some stage direction and conversations are omitted.) Sarah leads off:
SARAH
How might a government end,
Should all its officers resign of necessity,
Or the solvent of disorder melt it in adversity?
What becomes of the powers it exercised then?
LOUISE
Necessities which dissolve a government, do not convey its authority
To an oligarchy or monarchy.
They throw back, into the hands of the people,
The powers they had delegated and leave them
As individuals to shift for themselves.*
SARAH
Who shall constitute a new government?
Who are best suited in virtue and sentiment?
LOUISE
Those who labor in the earth
Are God’s chosen people,
Whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit
For substantial and genuine virtue.*
SARAH
It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire,
Which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.
Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators
Is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation
Has furnished an example.*
SARAH
Who shall constitute a new government?
Who are best suited in virtue and sentiment?
LOUISE
I think we shall be so, as long as agriculture is our principal object,
Which will be the case, while there remains vacant lands in any part of America.
When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe,
We shall become corrupt as in Europe,
And go to eating one another as they do there.*
The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government,
As sores do to the strength of the human body.*
SARAH
Every man, and every body of men on earth, possesses the right of self-government.
They receive it with their being from the hand of nature.*
Where does it begin, the spontaneity of majority rule?
Self-government cannot be taught in books and school,
Or arise by itself in the frontier’s rude clearing,
Or burst forth in city plazas filled with people fearing
To call a stranger ‘neighbor’ and ask neighbors for aid,
When no hand is extended for help but all to be paid.
It happens when we are doing something too big
For one person to build or his family to rig,
A bridge to span a river, a large home to please,
A dispute to settle, anything more than our expertise,
We incorporate others who consent of their will
For some of the reward to pay some of the bill.
Voluntary cooperation for projects, assent freely given,
Is how democracy begins and is prosperously driven.
LOUISE
Our natural rights are the gift of nature, but they grow in the soil
Of our labor in our land watered by the sweat of our toil.
Virtue is a tree that grows on our own property,
And wilts and dies when we live in dependency.
Our nation dissolves and we cannot set it right
Until our society is reborn within freeholders’ sight.
The mob’s clamorings for entitlements they claim to be owed
Are seeds of terror and murder broadcast and sowed.
We must earn back our country in this valley’s green space,
Giving to all who wish to labor a rightful place,
Giving birth to new politics on this hopeful ground,
And new government, founded again, free and sound.
Louise's Choose to Act Speech
From "Restoration (Tractor)"
The play from which Louise's speech is taken, "Restoration (Tractor)", concerns how evacuees from New York City, after a nuclear terrorist attack, cope with political chaos. In the monologue below, the character, Louise, a young, emerging political leader, seeks to rouse a group out of their political apathy into action. The group are older men who are restoring old railroad steam locomotives, hence the references in the last two stanzas to 'engines' and 'iron rails'. The setting is rural West Virginia, where the evacuees have been sent by the Department of Homeland Security. The monologue closes the play. Louise addresses the group:
To choose to act or live out phantom lives of virtual presence,
While about us order dissolves and the pulse of chaos quickens,
This is the choice history compels upon us.
The politics of democracy have collapsed into mockery,
Grand old parties spin like broken weather vanes on dilapidated barns,
While modern storm radars cannot see
The hurricanes raging in our streets.
The commons of our heritage is stolen
And sold in back-alley bargains by a thousand murderous gangs,
None swear fealty to any law but the lure of illegal gain.
The legacy of civility is torn by violence
And in its tattered tails no one can recognize our flag.
The battlements of personal property are besieged
By criminal regimes with no allegiance to our countryside,
No respect for privileges and rights, but beholden
Only to the treasuries of rogue leagues
Intent on national harm.
The horrors of mobs brawling and proud towers falling
Seem here like dim nightmares dreamed by someone else;
In our calm valley, it’s the date of first frost,
The prices of alfalfa and hay, and whether it will rain today,
That call upon us in the ‘Dawson Diner’ and ‘Food and Friends’;
But these semblances of local heritage are shadow play,
The northern lights of dreaming, the fraud of wish fulfilling,
A historical blink, some metaphysical wink of God,
That shall pass without notice into the future,
As unrecoverable as roadside signs for abandoned tourist sites,
Paint faded, words worn incomplete, unreadable.
Our country has to begin anew, here in this morn
With me and you, this inauspicious place of forgotten greatness,
Here, amidst giants of optimism, the fuel tenders
And silent engines of our confident past.
The rails of familiar institutions are torn up
And rights of way corrupted, but rebuilding must be begun.
In groups of five and ten, in unheated Autumn sheds and halls
Around the country, in fallow valleys, on misted hills,
In West Virginia, Colorado, old New England,
Wherever the land has a memory
And people remember how to come together
To reclaim in community their patrimony.
Let us be the first, my generation and yours;
Others will follow, and in a few years
When we put our ears to the iron rail
We will hear our nation pounding forward
With constructive life once again.
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