Verses poke fun at presidential election
Calvin Trillin, who calls himself a “deadline poet,” lived up to his description in the rush to complete and publish “Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme” (Random House, 128 pages, $14).
Trillin delivered his final verses within three days of Barack Obama’s election.
“I’m not one to knock the competition,” he says, “but Wadsworth never did that.”
But what if John McCain, the target of much of Trillin’s deadpan humor, had won?
“You know how some movies go directly to video?” Trillin asks at lunch near his Greenwich Village townhouse. “This book would have gone directly to the pulper, or whatever they use to pulp books, without ever stopping at the stores.”
Trillin, 72, is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of three books on food, his “tummy trilogy.”
He began writing doggerel on current events in 1990 for The Nation, a magazine known for its left-wing politics, not its poetry.
His first poem, inspired by the former White House chief of staff, was titled “If You Knew What Sununu.”
He has been at it ever since. The Bush administration supplied enough material for two collections: “Obliviously On He Sails” (2004) and “A Heckuva Job” (2006).
“Deciding” – which is “witty, quick and acute,” the New York Times said in a review written in verse – is a narrative about the two-year presidential campaign.
Interludes include “On A Clear Day, I Can See Vladivostok … the Barbra Streisand standard as sung by Sarah Palin,” who cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as foreign policy experience.
Trillin acknowledges that McCain and Palin (“the godsend”) were easier targets than Obama and Joe Biden, although one verse goes: “Joe carries many thoughts inside his head/And often leaves few of them left unsaid.”
Obama is tougher to mock, Trillin says: “It’s not a race problem, but he’s so even-tempered.”
Then there’s the words-that-rhyme-with-Obama challenge:
“I used them up dealing with Osama (as in bin Laden), although there’s ‘Don’t slap your momma.’ It’s a Southern expression I’ve heard in terms of, ‘That bacon is so good, it makes you want to slap your momma.’ ”
At home, Trillin has a bottle of Slap Your Momma hot sauce.
He says he voted for Obama, although McCain offered almost as many rhyming possibilities as his all-time favorite “iambic candidate,” Ross Perot.
Trillin’s only direct foray into politics lasted a month in 1964 as a speechwriter for President Johnson, “the last successful Democratic peace candidate.”
“They told me if the other guy (Barry Goldwater) won, he’d send troops to Vietnam,” he says.
Trillin denies any personal responsibility for the Vietnam War: “Johnson never used a word I wrote.”
His book ends by celebrating Obama’s victory, but Trillin says: “In this country, we make fun of the people in power. I’m sure something will come up.”