Dumocracy
OR, THE SNOB’S GOSPEL
When you think about car wrecks,
TV shows and Britney Spears,
it’s obvious stupidity’s
contagious as the plague.
Considering golf on the moon,*
vitamins and nipple rings,
most people are defenseless
vis-à-vis inanity.
When you ponder The Prophet,
Sigmund Freud and Chairman Mao,
there’s a lot of geniuses
who belong in pillories.
Behold Facebook (or even worse,
one more Einstein mocking it);
Disneyland, Ayn Rand, Pac Man —
someone’s been an idiot.
Beethoven’s got the disco beat
and Shelley’s peddling soft porn;
the glory of dumocracy
is you can’t be more smart than me.
When you figure lotteries
and unwanted pregnancies,
you can see fatuity
has become a federal case.
Then, there’s nitrous, molly,
pot and beer —
yes, you’ll vote for Hillary
next year.
Perhaps those diets and implants,
not to mention Jazzercise,
will prove that Barnum, if alive,
would rather wish that he was not.
We’ve a world of pedicures,
Scientology and memes;
don’t blame me when Fred Flintstone
metastasizes all your dreams.
Tchaikovsky hustles up ringtones
and Tolstoy now pimps out cartoons;
the beauty of dumocracy
is what you win is gravity.
*On the 1971 Apollo 14 moon landing, astronaut Alan Shepard hit golf balls with a six-iron for the daytime television audience, including golf aficionado President Nixon. Also collected 40 pounds of moon rocks. Tab to tax-payers, in ‘71 dollars: $400 million (Artemis Society International).
Craig Kurtz resides at Twin Oaks Intentional Community where he writes poetry while simultaneously surviving the dream. Recent work appears in Aerie Literary Journal, Conclave: A Journal of Character, The Criterion: An International Journal in English, Danse Macabre, Penumbra, Poetry Quarterly, Red Fez, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry and The Transnational.