.
Pushback
The New Puritans run amok,
remaking our society.
Through countless forms of media,
they assert their authority.
Through threat and bluster they control
those poor souls who’ll bend the knee,
but lighting up my Dunhill pipe,
I claw back some autonomy.
.
.
David Greenwood is a lecturer in the Department of Classics and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. After taking his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, he has authored books with Cornell, Cambridge, and Routledge, numerous articles in theology, philosophy, and history, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2021. His poetry has been published in numerous venues, including The Lyric and WestWard Quarterly.
I take “New Puritans” as antithetical to the well-known historical puritans who are attempting to remold culture in their own mistaken, objectionable, and damaging way through capturing the media while propagandizing and preaching devilish forms of behavior. If so, then I second the motion.
I’m with Roy on this fine poem. I love the reframing of the deep state overlords as the “New Puritans.”
Maybe the new deists will put an end to all the witch hunts!
All Puritans, old or new, are the same. Their one great fear is that somebody, somewhere, might be happy and enjoying himself.
Remember that the Pilgrims who came here in 1620 were misfits and troublemakers in their own land of Merrie England. Their uptight narrow-mindedness, their bleak rigidity, their incessant Bible-thumping, and their need to tell everyone around them how to live and pray and deport themselves, were simply intolerable.
They have never given up their deathgrip on American thinking. Their actual religious beliefs are now mostly gone, but their hunger for power and thought-control over other Americans is sharper than ever.
As I read it, the new puritans are those on the extreme right and the extreme left who through the mainstream and make-it-up media push their own intolerant agendas.
I’ll drink to that – with both a glass of Budweiser and a shot of Jim Beam.
Yes Paul, there are some Puritans on the extreme right (mostly fundamentalists and Bible-thumpers) who can be annoying. But they have nowhere near the power and influence of your friends on the extreme left, who are fanatical in trying to dictate how we should live, what we are allowed to say, what foods we should eat, how much coal and gas we can use, and how our children should be educated.
And when push comes to shove, bourgeois liberals always go along with what the extreme left says.
I think that autonomy can best be regained by reducing electronic, social media usage which has contributed to society’s downfall by turning the users’ personal life into a public spectacle. The media and varied political stances are not entirely to blame .
The countless platforms of media are places where puritans of all kinds can run amok, David, and thus I agree with Margaret Brinton that reducing one’s attention to them is autonomy. Still, I especially like your choice of the Dunhill pipe as a sign of high-quality contradiction!