Tuesday
There’s little I find more delicious than a humorous conjunction between a news story and a satiric poem. The news story in this case is Vice President Michael Pence’s claim that he was bitten by 2015 Triple Crown winner Pharaoh. The poem is Oliver Goldsmith’s “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog.”
The Hill reports on Pence’s claim:
Addressing GOP lawmakers at [a] House GOP retreat in Baltimore…, Pence said the famed Triple Crown winner bit his arm so hard he “almost collapsed” during a visit in March 2018.
“I just gritted my teeth and smiled,” Pence said. “Because you know what, in our line of work, you’re gonna get bit sometimes, but you keep fighting forward.”
Some are dubious:
But farm manager Dermot Ryan, who was there when Pence was presented with an American Pharoah halter, said Friday that the horse is “sweet” and that it would be out of character for American Pharoah to bite someone, the McClatchy news group reported.
“If he gave someone a nasty bite, I’d know it,” Ryan said.
Goldsmith’s poem features a man who, we are told, runs a “godly race” and is the soul of Christian piety. Our sanctimonious vice president, meanwhile, proudly proclaims his Christianity every chance he gets. Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner, authors of the Shadow President: The Truth about Mike Pence, tell several revealing stories in a CNN profile about Pence’s Christian background. For instance:
As a college freshman, he was elected to head his fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta. He also took command of a fellowship group, Vespers, which met in the campus chapel every Tuesday evening. At the frat he turned in his brothers for drinking beer. At the chapel he passed judgment on his peers.
And:
Eventually his faith led him to reject some friends and even regard his fiancée, Karen, as a sinner whom he would have to forgive in order to marry. These habits of mind, later revealed in his hostility to equality for gay people and even climate science, were formed when he was barely an adult.
Vespers was organized around songs and testimonies of faith. It offered community to students who were adjusting to the emotional challenge of leaving home. It also gave the guitar-playing Pence the opportunity to preach with the zeal of a new convert to right-wing Christianity. His schoolmate Linda Koon recalls a charismatic fellow who turned cruel when she failed to meet his definition of true faith.
“He was rigid, condescending and exclusionary,” Koon said in an interview. “You had to fit into his little pocket of Christianity, and I didn’t fit.”
Koon’s problem was that she couldn’t recount a dramatic come-to-Jesus tale of Christian conversion. “He acted like he had been struck by lightning,” she said. “I had just grown up in the Lutheran Church and had always been a Christian. That wasn’t good enough. He told me that wasn’t good enough, ‘God doesn’t want your kind.’ It was a very narrow view of an infinite being.”
There’s little sign he has mellowed.
Now for one of British literature’s great comic poems:
Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,--
It cannot hold you long.
In Islington there was a man,
Of whom the world might say
That still a godly race he ran,--
Whene'er he went to pray.
A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad,--
When he put on his clothes.
And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
And curs of low degree.
The dog and man at first were friends;
But when a pique began,
The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man.
Around from all the neighboring streets,
The wondering neighbors ran,
And swore the dog had lost his wits
To bite so good a man.
The wound it seemed both sore and sad
To every Christian eye;
And while they swore the dog was mad
They swore the man would die.
But soon a wonder came to light,
That showed the rogues they lied;
The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died.
How could Pharoah have bitten so good a man? If you want to worry about one of the parties in the affair, however, worry about the horse.
