STAND UP GUYS
Like other Americans I’ve been searching desperately for poetry – concise, vivid, explosively beautiful language – to make sense of the current political climate. I turned first to the pundits. Keith Olbermann, who performed eloquently on his nightly MSNBC show during the 2008 election, now publishes a video journal for GQ (The Closer) that takes the form of irrational, deeply-felt tirades. On her MSNBC show Maddow his former colleague Rachel Maddow shares intellectual musings that often don’t add up. And MSNBC’s smart first couple, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (Morning Joe), remain frustratingly restrained. So I’m turning to revisionist history. And I’m turning to actual poetry. Yet none of it captures exactly that thing that is simmering right now in America, and in me.
Is the best hope our stand-up comedians, with their irreverent, slapdash wisdom? A month before the 2016 election Bill Maher tweeted “The great sadness is even if Trump doesn’t become president, we live in a country where half the people think he should be.” Chris Rock, in a Rolling Stone interview, joked simply that the police might once in a while shoot a white man. And Marc Maron kicks off each WTF podcast with a ten-minute preamble in which he describes what he’s at that very moment doing, eating, listening to, annoyed with, and dreaming about, all of which veers, naturally and more and more frequently, straight into American politics.
He refers to the Charlottesville white supremacists as “the
army of unfuckable hate nerds.”
In each loosely-structured ten-minute soliloquy Maron conveys, with sense and passion, in an unembellished vernacular, the mood of the time. He’s a shouter and delivers every part of his show (cheesy on-air commercials, respectful guest introductions, conversation-prodding interjections) with the same level of earnestness. Maron is self-absorbed, but when he stops and looks outwards he can wrangle unsavory social complexities. His preamble feels like a form for our time, storytelling laced with rage.