Misrule Music
a poem by Robert Pinsky
When charismatic indecency carries the day There’s not much comfort in the ancient cult That says the dance of misrule always prances At its one frantic ball—seems like forever Until the music stops, the flags come down, And ordinary corruption comes back, refreshed In laughter. “Hitler has only got one ball.” Misrule, ha ha. But tell it to the victims: Millions at the time and millions more today And everyone ever since, forever, a victim? Long-ago bumper sticker, my naive, glib Heart in the right place: resist authority. The charismatic indecency that carries The day this year this time is not the antic Indecency of Harpo with scissors to snip My necktie if I am Simon the Pharisee Who invited Jesus to supper, when Jesus favored The sinner who brought expensive perfume to wash His feet—and Simon wondered, was it proper? Excuse the prig, bless Harpo, bless the sinner. God knows what’s in our nature, she used her hair. He squeezed a horn and chased a squealing woman Across the movie set. We laughed. The horse At the feast of Saturn rode the master’s back. Bless the anonymous indecent Carnival lyrics To the “Colonel Bogey March,” and all the better Knowing there never was a Colonel Bogey: “Himmler had something similar.” Prisoners of war Whistle the tune in Bridge on the River Kwai, “And Goebbels had no balls at all,” but no—No, This time, the very opposites themselves Reverse the cult of misrule itself undone Down to the altar. The European tribes Crowned for one day a fool a goat a chicken, To give the finger to a horned or strutting god. Sometimes the blond brutes even ate the chicken. Even the parody of order is all balled up. And if it has happened before, all the less reason Or more to wonder or shrug at whatever charisma Of darker or dumber indecency carries the day. This poem appears in the April 2026 print edition. Read THE ATLANTIC here
Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and herein the States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the great literatus of the modern. At all times, perhaps, the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself really sway’d the most, and whence it sways others, in its national literature, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous lands, a great original literature is surely to become the justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American democracy.
- Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas