In his essay condemning the Academy of American Poets’ effort to celebrate poetry each April titled “Against National Poetry Month As Such,” Charles Bernstein writes: “The kind of poetry I want is not a happy art with uplifting messages and easy to understand emotions. I want a poetry that's bad for you.”
In his poem, “The Ballad of the Girlie Man,” Bernstein provides a remarkable example of “poetry that’s bad for you.” Actually, it’s more like a piece of political propaganda than a poem. So it is, in fact, the kind of doggerel that would make ideologues “happy”—and they would consider its message uplifting, because it appeals to their ignorance that leads to emotional responses to events that they little understand.
Origin of “Girlie-Man”
On a Saturday Night Live skit, comedians Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon portrayed Arnold Schwarzenegger-like body builders Hans and Franz, and with a Schwarzenegger accent they referred to people without a muscular build as “girlie men.” Then Governor Schwarzenegger alluded to that skit by calling the California congress “girlie-men,” because they failed to pass his budget.
Bernstein’s allusion to the term is a contrivance and has no literary value: “A democracy once proposed / Is slimmed and grimed again / By men with brute design / Who prefer hate to rime.” In order to accept such an assertion, one has to have swallowed the propaganda machines’ slogans, such as “Bush lied, people died.”
Those who believe such slogans remain unacquainted with the sources that prove that Bush did not "lie."
Other Examples of Propaganda
The poem is targeting the Iraq War, not the failure of the California congress to pass the governor’s budget. But the speaker of the poem uses the term “girlie man” to refer to the correct thinkers, those Michael Moore types, who yammer their propaganda such as “Complexity's a four-letter word / For those who count by nots and haves / Who revile the facts of Darwin / To worship the truth according to Halliburton.” The reader might wonder if Bernstein, like Michael Moore, owns some stock in the evil Halliburton, even as he defiles the company’s reputation.
The mantra for this exercise in self-flagellation is “The truth is hidden in a veil of tears / The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear.” This meaningless couplet is repeated three times, and then a fourth time with the lines reversed, it ends the poem.
Capitalism is bad: “Thugs from hell have taken freedom's store / The rich get richer, the poor die quicker.” These lines are also repeated.
The girlie-men are better than those who are not girlie-men: “We girly men are not afraid / Of uncertainty or reason or interdependence / We think before we fight, then think some more / Proclaim our faith in listening, in art, in compromise.” And what do you do after you have listened, made art (?), and compromised, and the enemy is still intent on killing you?
A Little Ditty
The poem also contains a little ditty along with its mantras of name-calling and class-baiting: “So be a girly man / & sing a gurly song / Take a gurly stand / & dance with a girly sarong.” Why “girly” become “gurly” in the second and third line is not clear. Or why “girlie” became “girly” in the first ine. A further inconsistency is that a sarong is a garment worn by both men and women in the Pacific Islands, so what would make a sarong “girly” is also not clear.
But purpose of the poem is clear: it says, “we’re better than you because we adhere to a vague sense of self-righteousness”; it consists of ideological talking-points that demonstrate a blind political stance, ungrounded in historical fact or the reality of current events.
Kudos to Bernstein, however, for writing a poem that is bad for you. He’s a man of his word.
