In German, a Weinfest is a wine festival. Such celebrations are common in the grape-growing regions of lower Germany, where free-flowing new wine marks the end-of-autumn harvest. The most famous one is the Oktoberfest (though this is primarily a beer festival) held in Bavaria. The Oktoberfest is now so popular that there are often more foreign tourists than Bavarians in attendance.
Unfortunately we don’t have wine or beer festivals in America. A country run by puritanical suburban soccer moms would never allow the celebration of alcohol. But we do have our own specialized Whine-Fests, to coin a phrase. We are a nation of whiners. Their number and variety are legion.
First and foremost, we have the professional victim class, composed largely of minority group members who whine about their need for special privileges. Then we have the feminists, who whine about sexism, glass ceilings, and pay differentials. We have our assorted freaks and perverts, whining for official recognition of their lifestyles. There is my own group, the academics, who whine about lazy students, plagiarized papers, and infrequent sabbaticals. There are the chattering classes in the mainstream media who whine about almost anything: global warming, nuclear weapons, terrorism, tobacco, and trans-fats. And last but not least, we have The Poets.
Poets are notorious whiners. It’s to be expected in a marginalized art form, where the rewards are trivial and the public recognition practically nil. Poets whine about everything: lack of audience, scarcity of publishers, cronyism and cliques, bad reviews, limited prize money. One would think that with so many disadvantages these poets would simply get out of the business of versifying altogether. But they don’t. Perversely, they seem to enjoy the Great Whine-Fest. Why?
The first thing to remember about whining is that it has nothing to do with real pain and suffering. God knows there’s enough actual torment in the world, and we all get a share of it: sickness, bereavement, loss, crime, ingratitude, violence, grief, injustice, degeneracy. Whining is not the normal response to real evils of this sort. Whining is a category of performance art. It’s a social status marker designed to show others that one is special and superior.
Whining is not just a way to demonstrate one’s unhappiness. That’s only a subsidiary purpose. The primary goal of whining is to set oneself apart from others, to advertise one’s specialness and elite status. Poets want desperately to see themselves in such a light, so whining for them has become what you might call an occupational necessity. They have to show the world that they are starkly and poignantly unhappy. This haute couture unhappiness separates them from the great mass of persons who are going about enjoying life as best they can.
Look at the typical poet at a public reading. If he isn’t overtly demented, he’s most likely an awkward misfit in a black turtleneck and denims, with an ever-quivering lower lip and a barely audible voice. He’ll read his poems with a lugubrious solemnity that makes you wonder if you have inadvertently walked into a wake. And no matter what he actually says, you’ll hear this sotto voce subtext:
How dare you have fun! The world is filled with [here, dear reader, you may fill in the blank space with any or all of the following: oppression, poverty, racism, sexism, corruption, homophobia, ignorance, pollution], and it behooves us to be seriously concerned about such matters! I am smart enough and cultured enough to know that the world should be managed differently. I make this superiority known via judicious whining. I hope you will cease being complacently content, and join me in the Great Whine-Fest. Then we can all feel superior to the masses.
Of course no one would actually admit to thinking the above thoughts, but a pretty good facsimile of them seems to dominate a lot of poets today, if their verse is taken in evidence. And since intelligent connoisseurs of poetry come to it primarily for aesthetic pleasure, they walk out on the whiners. It’s a perfectly rational human response.
All of a sudden I hear the chorus of my enemies thundering at me: All you do is whine and complain in your satires, Salemi! No, I beg to differ. Anyone who says that doesn’t understand poetry at all. My satires are meant to attack, to be sure, but they are primarily verbal jeux d’esprit. They are designed to delight with wordplay and rhetoric and all the resources of English idiom. To take my satires as merely “complaints” about the modern world is to fall into the mistake that I have warned poets against for years—namely, the fatal error of imagining that a poem is essentially an ideational message contained in a receptacle of words. That is not the case at all, and if you think that it is you will never produce a single worthwhile poem, except perhaps for your fellow retards in an on-line workshop.
Whine all you like if you must, but your primary responsibility is to produce a well-crafted poem. That’s what a reader has a right to expect from you. There are some people who will retort that the urgency of complaining against an evil outweighs any aesthetic considerations. Well, that’s just stupid. You can scream out in bad grammar and stylistic slovenliness when you’re in an emergency situation where immediacy is essential. But poetry is one of the arts of civilized leisure. It doesn’t deal with “emergency situations,” no matter how upset you happen to be about them. It’s designed to be enjoyed by persons at their ease, who want to savor the verbal craft of finely wrought language. If that isn’t there, your pathetic little message doesn’t mean a swiving thing.
And here, in my view, is the real source of the Great Whine-Fest: the visceral hatred of a cultivated and leisurely lifestyle. The idea of affluent persons living their private lives in ease and comfort, enjoying the fine arts, and untroubled by the noisome idiocies of the outside world, drives a certain type of leftist pseudopoet insane with resentment.
This hatred is a hangover from Marxism. Marxism as a political and economic theory is as extinct as the dodo, but a sick specter of it survives in what paleoconservatives call “cultural Marxism”—that is, a complex of attitudes, prejudices, and reflex gestures that still permeate much of the West. Cultural Marxism is preached openly in our schools and colleges, dominates the mainstream media, and infects most of the verbalist professions, including poetry. And one of its salient characteristics is the idea that to be comfortable and content is an unforgivable social crime. As a fatuous liberal clergyman once put it, “Our task is to afflict the comfortable.” In the context of such a worldview, whining becomes virtuous and ennobling.
It’s a totally psychopathic and countercultural attitude. Next month I’ll explain why cultivated leisure and comfort are the mainstays of civilized life and the arts that serve it. Stay tuned.
