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Tuesday
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic has a way of voicing much of what is on my mind, and in yesterday’s newsletter he articulated a recurring anxiety: that Joe Biden will lose the 2024 election to Donald Trump because people see him as boring. Even though the president has an impressive list of White House accomplishments to his name—as opposed to Trump, who had virtually none (and who attempted a coup to boot)—Nichols says that the American voter “has come to expect celebrity and excitement from the White House, and they pay little attention to policy.”
Which brings to mind a W.H. Auden poem about a boring man. I agreed with Auden’s satiric point when I was in high school, but now, in light of rising fascism, I see it very differently.
Before getting to it, however, let’s look at some of Biden’s accomplishments. I owe the following to Up North News, a Madison WI website that follows political matters.
When the Democrats held Congress during the first two years of his presidency, the president can be credited with lowering healthcare and drug costs (including insulin); fighting climate change; reducing energy costs; investing in mental health care; and investing in American manufacturing and infrastructure. During that time he also signed into law the most consequential federal gun safety legislation in decades, canceled up to $20,000 in federal student loans for millions of Americans, dramatically increased domestic microchip manufacturing, and reformed the U.S. postal service to ensure its long-term stability.
Oh yes, and he led the international effort to support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, oversaw the reauthorization of the Violence against Women Act, nominated the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, and pardoned all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession.
I would go on and on only I’m afraid of, well, boring you. I’ll just add all those things the Biden has not done, including cost the country a million lives by botching a pandemic response, pardon cronies in jail, channel government money to himself, undermine NATO, cozy up to Vladimir Putin, stack the Supreme Court with rightwing ideologues, separate immigrant families from their children and, oh yes, incite his followers to attack the Capitol.
And if Biden is reelected, he will not try to end Obamacare, ban abortions nationwide, place millions of immigrants in camps, separate children from their immigrant families, make life hard for LGBTQ+ folk, prevent Muslims from coming into the country, and fill the Justice Department, the military, and the federal work force with rightwing extremists.
Of course, if Biden did do these things, he’d be far more exciting. But you get my point.
Now for Auden’s “Unknown Citizen.” Until I looked it up, I was sure that it was written during the 1950s, but it was actually composed in 1939, prior to World War II. “Prior” is important since I expect Auden would have been worried about other things than faceless bureaucrats once England, France and Poland started fighting the Nazis.
The poem became a hit in the 1950s when Americans were worried about faceless corporate jobs and cookie cutter housing developments. At the time we lamented that modern life and consumer culture were blotting out individuality. The idea, however, of someone who “served the Greater Community” in everything he did, who was pro-union, and who never interfered in his children’s education (in other words, assumed the teachers were professionals who could do their jobs) actually sounds pretty good these days. Here’s the poem:
The Unknown Citizen
By W.H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Of course, one of Auden’s targets here is the surveillance state—the “we” in the poem—and that is indeed something to be concerned about. Our ability to get information about individuals far exceeds Auden’s worst fears.
Otherwise, however, the poem describes many members of what NBC’s Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation.” If we can’t appreciate these men and women, Nichols believes, it’s because “bored and sated voters are more prone to reward showmanship, overblown promises, and made-for-TV rage than competence.” Auden undervalues Unknown Citizen’s ability to do his job well.
Biden may not be, “in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word,” a saint. But he’s a lot closer than many in Washington. And as he himself is fond of saying, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”