Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (19 page)
Read Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Online
Authors: Calvin Trillin
“And how about Victor Navasky?” my wife said.
“Oh, he’ll get along without me.”
“No doubt,” she said. “But will you get along without him? Every time you haven’t been able to think of a column idea, you’ve attacked poor Victor—just the way Ronald Reagan, whenever he was stuck for an answer, used to mention that woman who picked up her Aid for Dependent Children check in a Cadillac.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Navasky has been, in a manner of speaking, my welfare cheat. Doing the column for the newspapers, I wouldn’t have Navasky to kick around anymore. I could imagine editors from Midwestern dailies sending queries back to the syndication people: “Who’s this Navasky anyway?” they’d ask, or “What’s this mean here—‘There’s no gonif like a left-wing gonif’?”
“Yes, I will miss the old W. & P.,” I said to my wife.
“Well, it would be nice if you did something to show that,” she said.
Fine. But what? “I’ve got it,” I said, after a while. “I’ll attack him for trying to double my pay.”
1986
Could there be anyone else who was inspired to write poetry by the presence of John Sununu? It has occurred to me that if I ever get to poets’ heaven—as I envision it, it’s a place where the accent is on any syllable you want it to be on, and there are plenty of rhymes for “orange”—I might find myself feeling rather awkward during a discussion that turns toward how all of us poets acquired the vital spark of inspiration. William Shakespeare, for instance, might talk passionately, if rather enigmatically, about how inspiring the dark lady of his sonnets was. Sooner or later, the other poets would look my way, and I’d say, “Well, when George H. W. Bush was President of the United States, he had this guy from New Hampshire as chief of staff.…”
Sununu surfaced at a time when the small-joke trade was trying to cope with what you might call a serious gray-out. The most prominent members of Bush the First’s administration were respectable Ivy League gentlemen whose blandness was not even spiced up by a decent scandal. Political cartoonists had trouble telling them apart.
Only Sununu had all the attributes we look for—arrogance, self-importance, and a management style that he might have picked up intact from the Emperor Caligula. Not since the relatively brief appearance several years before of Robert Bork—who turned out to be more interested in showing himself to be the smartest man in the room than he was in being on the Supreme Court—had Washington served up a character so intent on letting everybody know how intelligent he was.
Was I inspired by all of this? Yes, of course. But to poetry? Not exactly. What led me to poetry was that wondrously euphonious name—Sununu. I couldn’t get his name out of my mind. “Sununu,” I would murmur to myself while riding the subway or doing some little task around the house. Sooner or later the murmuring became the title of a poem—“If You Knew What Sununu.”
After I’d sent “If You Knew What Sununu” to the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky, he phoned me to suggest that I do a poem for every issue of
The Nation
. Steeling myself, I asked how much he intended to pay for each poem.
“How long does it take you to write one of these?” he asked.
“I usually write them on Sunday,” I said. “Which is at least time and a half, and in most trades double time. There is also the matter of poetic inspiration—walking on the windswept bluff, and all that. Just to get from here to a windswept bluff that could be considered remotely inspirational …”
As I said that, I could hear his calculator clicking away. “How about a hundred?” he said.
What I realized instantly—what I suppose he meant me to realize instantly—was that I would be getting the same money for a poem as I’d gotten from an eleven-hundred-word column.
“What are the conditions?” I asked. With the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky, there is always a condition or two.
“Don’t tell any of the real poets you’re getting that much,” he said.
“Your secret is safe with me,” I assured him.
At first, I didn’t think a century sounded like much. But then I learned that real poets are normally paid by the line. Three-fifty or four dollars a line is fairly common, I was told, and ten dollars a line
is probably tops. Since I was being paid by the poem, I realized, all I needed to become the highest paid poet in the world was pithiness. When I want to get that buzz you get when you know you’re working for the absolute top dollar in your field, I write a two-line poem. Fifty dollars a line.
1994
“I believe in an inclusive political system that prohibits from public office only those whose names have awkward meter or are difficult to rhyme.”
New Hampshire Governor, White House Chief of Staff
If you knew what Sununu
Knows about quantum physics and Greek
And oil explorations and most favored nations
And the secret handshake of Deke,
Maybe you, too, like Sununu,
Would adopt as your principal rule
That you are the brightest, you’re lit the lightest,
And everyone else is a fool.
With the IQ that Sununu
Relentlessly tells us is his,
You might think you’re paid to devote half your day to
Displaying yourself as a whiz.
But
If it’s true that Sununu’s
So smart, you’d think that he’d know
What always defines the truly fine minds:
The smartest guys don’t let it show.
1990
Vice President of the United States
What’s that, behind the President-Elect—
That manlike object stiff from head to toe?
A statue of a noble Southern pol?
A waxen image crafted by Tussaud?
But wait! He breathed. He blinked. He scratched his nose.
This couldn’t be an adamantine blob.
This manlike object seems to be alive.
It’s Albert Gore. He’s there to do his job.
1992
President of the United States
I liked the way that Reagan simply vanished when he could.
For weeks, we’d hear a single phrase: “He’s happy chopping wood.”
If we were not aware of him, he didn’t seem to care.
When Ronald Reagan wasn’t there, he simply wasn’t there.
This Clinton’s with us day and night—his voice, his plans, his sax.
At times, you want to say, “Hey, Bill, just cool it, guy. Relax.”
Yes, Clinton needs a rest, all right, and we need one from him.
We needn’t know with whom he golfs, with whom he takes a swim.
We can’t absorb so much of him. That’s one of our frustrations.
I think that our relationship needs separate vacations.
1993
Texas Senator, Secretary of the Treasury
The man is known for quo pro quidness.
In Texas, that’s how folks do bidness.
1993
Contender for the Republican Presidential Nomination
And now we have a junior Forbes,
Named Steve, who cheerfully absorbs
The campaign costs. (For he enjoys
What Daddy couldn’t spend on toys.)
He longs for tax rates that are flat—
The same for him, a plutocrat,
As for his gardeners and his chars
And all the men who wax his cars.
Economies, he says, can grow
If builders get to keep their dough.
If all of them are forced to share it,
They’ll lose incentive to inherit.
1995
Indiana Senator, Contender for the
Republican Presidential Nomination
Poor Lugar’s problem’s quite specific:
The man is simply soporific.
His speeches, well prepared and deep,
Affect one much like counting sheep.
Although his résumé is great, he
Can really make your eyelids weighty.
His ads now say that he’s the guy
We want in charge if bad types try
To do atomic terror here.
He may be right, except it’s clear
If Dick is prez—make no mistake—
We’ll need the Bomb to stay awake.
1995
California Governor, Contender for the
Republican Presidential Nomination
A month’s campaign for Wilson came to naught.
He tried to sell his soul, and no one bought.
1996
Kansas Senator, Republican Nominee for President
So many folks will miss you when you leave,
And as a poet, Bob, I’m going to grieve.
I’ll miss your wit, the darkness of your soul—
But mostly all those words that rhyme with Dole.
Yes, “decontrol” and “poll” and “camisole”
And “goal” and “Old King Cole” and “escarole.”
With Clinton staying in the White House it’ll
Remain so hard; he rhymes with very little.
You’ll be nearby. We say, in voce sotto,
At least the Watergate’s not Kansas, Toto.
1996
New York Senator
Here’s what could drive a man to drink—
To drink until he’s wholly blotto:
The thought that he is being judged
On ethics by Alfonse D’Amato.
As this stretch suggests, the senator’s name was not easy to rhyme, although I found that it did rhyme with “sleazeball obbligato.”
1996
President of the United States
The tapes are coming thick and fast.
There’s JFK, with staff amassed
When war with Russia was so close
We all might have to say
adios
.
And Lyndon Johnson’s tapes reveal
The man was keen to make a deal—
And to that end was not averse
To being bullyboy or worse.
Such tapes are bound to be replete
With clay in presidential feet.
(Republicans up on the Hill
Must wish they had such tapes of Bill;
They think that Bill, although he’s canny,
Has clay extending to his fanny.)
But when it comes to feet of clay,
New Nixon tapes have won the day.
His quick response to any news
Is break the law or blame the Jews.
We hear him planning to defraud,
Collecting dough for posts abroad,
Discussing B&E techniques.
In Nixon’s tapes, the master speaks.
1997
President of the United States
Obliviously on he sails,
With marks not quite as good as Quayle’s.
The fact that those marks got him into Harvard Business School is another confirmation of which class of Americans the original affirmative action system was established to benefit
.
1999
Missouri Senator, Attorney General
A Newly Unearthed Gospel Song Credited to John Ashcroft
As I told the Bob Jones students,
Seated white and black apart,
This nation is unique, not like the rest.
As I faced those godly youngsters,
I told them from the heart
Just why this land will always be the best:
The only king we have is Jesus,
And I feel blessed to bring that news.
The only king we have is Jesus.
I can’t explain why we’ve got Jews.
So because our king is Jesus,
I’m often heard to say,
Our kids should pray to Him each day in class.
If some kids just stay silent,
That’s perfectly okay,
But they’ll all be given Jesus tests to pass.
The only king we have is Jesus.
That’s the truth we all perceive.
The only king we have is Jesus,
So Hindus may just have to leave.
Now Jesus hates abortion,
’Cause Jesus loves all life.
They call it choice; it’s murder all the same.
The killers must be punished—
The doctor, man, and wife.
We’ll execute them all in Jesus’ name.