(05-16-2025, 12:49 PM)RiverNotch Wrote: Part of the essence of poetry is its unison of style and substance. Stylistically, there's nothing that stands out from this per se, but like the most objectionable verses of Kipling or Eliot, the substance is
shite. The critique here is that a church is being racist because it objects to a state's blatantly racist actions in accepting white "refugees" (South Africa, as far as I know, is not in such a state of crisis as Palestine or much of South America, not least with its Afrikaner citizens), as opposed to refugees of color elsewhere? There may be some systemic hypocrisy behind it---for all I know, that particular church may be in day-to-day operations quite hostile to dark skinned folk---but this poem does not address it, not at all. Instead, it works with a warped, fundamentally broken logic, like critiquing antifascists for violence when the entire premise of fascism is to monopolize violence, one that will only be acceptable to a delusional audience that is not nearly as numerous as the speaker thinks they are. An audience that I know will eventually diminish further, leaving this poem a black stain in the author's reputation---again, like Eliot and Kipling or Pound or Wagner, for all their sublimity, are seen as monsters now. To be even more Christian, sublimity is a worse virtue than justice, or than salvation.
And to turn to the source Himself, He said it's good to listen to what the hypocrites say, not what they do, and if such high-churchers are being hypocritical now, they're certainly not saying anything false.
Thanks for the critique. I take from it that, while the style is undistinguished at best, the content really got your goat (as the saying is). Combining this with @busker's, it seems I need more poetic flashes, and to personalize the people concerned (an American Episcopalian and an Afrikaner refugee, perhaps) by asking the reader - fruitlessly in some cases - to alternately see the situation through their eyes. Perhaps even to sympathize: each will take some work on the part of readers who are not initially sympathetic, so there have to be little prizes for the reader getting over himself.
More discursively,
I find it significant that both critics (fellow seekers after truth) find it appropriate to downgrade and demean the Afrikaners' perilous situation - as if they come up short in the victim league table. I agree there are more hellish places than most of today's South Africa - Haiti, to choose an easy example, where those living in Port-au-Prince are in worse straits even than Soweto. Instead of a corrupt government, they have none - aside from criminal gangs. Instead of intermittent services, they have cholera and no services because the gangs make it too dangerous for anyone to provide them.
With that in mind, it could be argued that the Haitians are more deserving than the Afrikaners. But in that case, why doesn't the Dominican Republic - which is right there on Hispaniola with them - help? Answer: because the problem is too big and too knotted for anything but an Alexandrian sword. That is, go in militarily for ten years and set the place to rights. That is, colonialism. Short of that, Haiti is insoluble. So, probably, is South Africa. Mandela's peace and reconciliation didn't take, in the end it only produced a regime change and a reshuffling of the racial pecking order.
So, some problems are too big (and sometimes the obvious solution, like sending the Marines into Haiti or a democratically elected government in South Africa, have been tried and have failed). By comparison, accepting refugee Afrikaners a few score at a time is within American capabilities and competence. There's a danger that they might form unassimilated communities as (for example) Somalis seem to have done, but their language ability and - let's be honest - appearance will ease assimilation. At least one American black woman has threatened them with violence, but the police can deal with that... it doesn't take the Secret Service.
So, yes, the Episcopalians are hypcrites. They don't live up to their own standards, or they amend them to fit their racial politics. Are they good people otherwise? A question worth asking. Are the Afrikaners good people aside from being embarrassingly white? Maybe so. Do they deserve the hate? Not without knowing them, and probably not then.
The US government accepting Afrikaners as refugees - real refugees, not economic migrants who claim they felt unsafe in their native lands that have been accepted by the thousand - is not racist. Which has become nothing but a swear-word, anyway, among Americans of a certain political disposition. There may be other reasons for feeling unpleasantly challenged by the plight of South African whites, to the point of denial: the US did, after all, use a lot of force and influence to help produce a failed Mandelan, now ANC-corrupt situation of which the whites are some of the victims (there are plenty of black victims, too). If there is guilt to be assuaged, there's a real fountain of it there - and hating its, that is our, victims is a shrewd way of denying it. Shrewd, but not necessarily successful.
Non-practicing atheist