What If I Just Never Got Political?
Until a couple days ago, I didn’t know who the hell Charlie Kirk even was. Being a white, male American of decidedly bad ass Polish stock, I have the luxury of ignoring the completely batshit crazy situations trending on the six o’clock news.
Fortunately, I have an eighty-year-old live-in father-in-law who keeps his finger on the pulse. Hooking him up with a Facebook account, in hindsight, probably wasn’t a hot idea. Just imagine Milt as the Microchip to my Frank Castle, except in this scenario, the Punisher just wants to ignore the rampant criminality and concentrate on listening to The Builders and the Butchers musical catalogue on vinyl.
“You see where Trump wants to invade your old stomping grounds, sweet home Chicago?”
“Lots of luck with that,” I laugh. “Seriously, though, the National Guard should be okay as long as they pack it in before the streetlights come on.”
“Reckon he just wants a distraction from the Epstein file thing.”
Sometimes I feel as though I exist in one large, looping Mandala effect. I thought his pedophiliac tendencies had already been established. People voted for him, anyway because they found Hilary’s, then Kamala’s, pant suits offensive.
“Milt, you voted for that orange bastard, twice.”
Meanwhile, I’d never cast a single vote in my entire life. Even in third grade when the class had to take a vote if they wanted chocolate milk or regular milk, I abstained. Everyone knows in the classic milk debate the correct answer is Miller High Life.
I like to think I resist the urge to weigh in on politics. My notebooks are littered with political rantings, but like your usual incels, I’d like to keep my opinions buried until the authorities feel compelled to publish them. Mostly, I think of myself as ill-qualified to offer a meaningful opinion. I don’t watch the news, I roll my eyes at the social media pundits, I pretty much despise politicians of any ilk. True altruists do not exist in the public arena.
My personal beliefs are so scattered and compromised by personal variables that I’m distrusted by the left, demonized by the right, and altogether dismissed by the moderate center. I’ll fight all day long for transgender rights. If you got a guy who wants to grow his hair long and tuck his junk, we can hang out and watch horror movies all day long. I just find it suspect when he wants to compete against women in a home run derby is all. I believe absolutely in a woman’s right to choose. I’m disgusted when abortion becomes an extreme form of birth control at a certain point. But what point is that? The second? The fifth? How do you regulate that? You don’t. I don’t, anyway. Because I can have an opinion, I just shouldn’t have a say in the matter. I like guns. As an occasional crime writer, I fetishize gun violence. I see it glamorized constantly. I don’t masturbate to John Wick films, but it certainly feels cathartic when he guns down his one thousandth Russian gangster because Theon Greyjoy killed his puppy five movies ago. But there has to be a way to keep motherfuckers from massacring children in schools. There’s gotta be a way. I don’t know what that way is. Not realistically. The genie’s out of the bottle. Maybe banning assault weapons is the way, but it’s not the American way. Maybe it will keep machine guns out of the hands of psychopaths. I don’t know. So, what do I do with all these opinions? I tend to sit in my Alabama bunker, The Polistress of Solitude, and just keep my mouth shut. I certainly don’t mix alcohol and social media. Not in the last ten years, anyway.
I come home from work the other day and barely got the Stoufer’s lasagna in the oven before Milt announces, “Charlie Kirk’s been shot.”
My first question is, “Milt, would it kill you to wash one fucking dish?” His fucking lunch Tupperware sits in the middle of the sink as useless as Pete Hegseth in the middle of a discussion focused on the military tensions in the Middle East.
My second question is, “who the fuck is Charlie Kirk?”
My third question which will forever remain unvoiced is, “why would you take Pete Hegseth, a guy who looks like he buys jungle cats from the Tiger King, a guy who looks like he accuses Hindu clerks behind the counter of the Wavaho gas station of being a Muslim as he buys a Mountain Dew and some boner pills, and put him in charge of anything, let alone the Department of Defense, now the Department of War, because apparently he can answer ‘yes, as many times as the pills allow’ to the question ‘who masturbates to the John Wick movies?’”
Milt doesn’t know who Charlie Kirk is. His personal history as a middle management guy for Chrysler doesn’t allow him to admit he doesn’t know, and, also, such an answer would only truncate the conversation, so his mouth keeps flapping. He believes what he heard was that Charlie Kirk was the single greatest American to ever walk this country’s roads since Thomas Jefferson. It’s a dubious claim, and a bit of research reveals that Kirk had a bit of something mean to say about damn near anybody who felt a little left of center, a little darker than white. I hear him referred to as a White Nationalist, and that may be one definition of his schtick. I just saw someone who weaponized Christianity, yet again, to make himself very rich and internet famous. If left alone, he would have been doing the Watusi on Dancing With the Stars inside of five years.
Milt wants to bet the assassin was a California liberal, but it would be senseless to take him up on the bet. If I wanted his cash, I’d just go to his bureau and help myself. We can blame the missing scratch on dementia later once it’s been confirmed the killer was even more zealously to the right of Kirk. And say what you will about Kirk, he always came across as reasonable and eloquent in his debates regardless of what sort of hateful doctrine he dissembled. If history teaches us one thing, it’s the reasonable and eloquent in the world of politics who get taken out first, even if you don’t need an assassination to distract from the Epstein files and sow further dissension among increasingly radicalized segments of the right and left.
Come to find out, Kirk’s killer, Tyler Robinson, is the same age as my son. This kills me, because Robinson is allegedly getting off a kill shot with amazing precision, my son burns himself cooking a pot of macaroni and cheese with astounding regularity.
Tyler Robinson’s grandmother says the whole family is MAGA, through and through. They love their guns. They love their Jesus. They distrust the black man, and they’re leery of a centralized government more than one degree separated from Trump. I bet you there are at least one or two liberals in their family, and they’re scared to fucking death of getting found out. I can relate; I live in Alabama. When you work in a machine shop located in a welfare state betrothed to King Trump, learn real quick to disavow any inclinations you harbor toward poetry or any compassion you might tender for the downtrodden and the oppressed.
Hell, just last week, I casually mentioned reading a Frank O’Hara poem and immediately came under suspicion of being soft on immigration. I had to quickly beat the shit out of a transgender if only to dispel a fraction of the boys’ dissatisfaction aimed at me. Shit, it honestly could have just been an athletic woman on the receiving end of the bicycle chain whipping. A MAGAt warrior in full fury knows no allies, knows no difference between a feminine man and a masculine woman, between a watermelon harvesting immigrant and a dope-slinging gangbanger. There’s White and Right and then there’s all the rest.
Fuck, man. It’s times like these I realize my great-great-great-grand pappy Silas Nuttennappen on my mother’s side being a black transgender is really going to eventually bite me in the ass when sides are being chosen.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
