Politics

[This article first appeared in Grocott’s Mail in January 2015. Much of it still applies, I suspect.]

Politics is rarely a clear-cut issue.  Capable of rousing the fiercest of polarised feelings, it is a topic which, like religion, it is often sensible to avoid.

But it’s not easy to ignore it now as we move towards another national election, and poets have often been at the forefront of political thought, opinion and action.

My Pocket Oxford dictionary defines ‘politics’ as “the science and art of government”.  Sounds good; sounds right.

Unfortunately, what should be an honourable and invigorating subject has too often been cheapened by those elected to lead us, so it is hardly surprising that scepticism quickly takes the place of idealism.  The “science and art of government” sometimes seems too readily replaced by the science and art of manipulative self-enrichment.

And this is not, of course, peculiar to South Africa.  The UK Poet Laureate articulated her disenchantment with the British political system during a time when some British politicians were caught supplementing their salaries with taxpayers’ money and then lying about it:

Politics

How it makes of your face a stone

that aches to weep, of your heart a fist,

clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue

an iron latch with no door. How it makes of your right hand

a gauntlet, a glove puppet of the left, of your laugh

a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your desert island discs

hiss hiss hiss, makes of the words on your lips dice

that can throw no six. How it takes the breath

away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,

makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,

of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk. How it says this –

politics – to your education education education; shouts this –

Politics! – to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your

conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS, POLITICS, POLITICS.

Carol Ann Duffy

First published in The Guardian (UK), Saturday 13 June 2009

Who was the cynic who said, ‘It doesn’t matter who you vote for – the government always gets in’?

Yet, as Wikipedia points out, ‘politics’ can be traced back to the Greek word polis, meaning ‘city’, from which a related definition derives: “of, for, or relating to citizens”.

So in this sense politics is centred primarily on people, not on systems of government.  Perhaps more of our representatives should make the effort to acknowledge this reality and act accordingly.  Elected politicians are servants of the people who placed them in office but too often, when the elections are over, the ordinary citizens become faceless again and their ‘servants’ disappear.

Perhaps this poem, by the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, himself involved in Irish revolutionary politics, is worth reading again.  It was written in 1938, before the start of World War II and while the Spanish Civil War was raging.  These were matters of enormous international political importance, yet it is the small, personal memory of love that moves him:

Politics

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

William Butler Yeats

From The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1996), Scribner