Getting Around Political Writing Essays

Getting Around Political Writing Essays'Our Next Article - Maggie Simpson,' and 'We Have Always Been at War with the Communists and We Will Keep at War With Them For the Long Term,' are two of the selected essays for my new column on political writing. They offer provocative, sometimes embarrassing insights into the workings of contemporary American politics. In this piece, I'd like to take you through the thought process behind the selection of these two essays for inclusion in the column. What were the criteria?Thoughts are hard to communicate. If you tell someone what you're thinking, what are they going to think? Writing is only an expression of your internal thoughts. Those thoughts get conveyed to a reader only by a writer's voice, his or her words, not in a written form.It's one thing to say something while you're alone, or one another, but it's another to write something that may even confuse someone else. One good way to do this is by choosing topics that don't necessarily m ake sense. 'Politics Are Like That,' 'If People Are Born, They'll Be Useless,' and 'You Think of All the People You Know Who Are Gay, Now Think of All the People You Don't Know Who Are Gay,' are subjects whose meaning is not obvious to everyone who reads them.To select the choi of a topic such as this, I often had to select subjects I knew I wouldn't be ridiculed by someone. Some people said 'I'll believe anything she says about the chicken debate unless she actually says the phrase 'I'm Not Chicken, I'm Chicken' ', and when I was telling my colleagues about the subject, some said 'But isn't the only reason that you make up words, and say what you're thinking, because you can't make up words that aren't offensive?'Since most of those present at the conversation made the choi of the topic questionable anyway, I had to find other, more plausible subjects. I went out and got some chickens and put them in a chicken coop. I've also had lots of people ask me how I wrote 'a Fascist Is Easy to Spot,' since it has all kinds of blood-spattered red words. Not only do the words look bad, but I didn't want to offend anyone, so I had to go out and buy a Sharpie and draw a V for Fascism on the paper.Of course, people like things to be both true and appealing, and so when we go shopping for a magazine where we can write, we choose topics that are both interesting and wrong-headed. These topics 'Dangerous Waters'I Love in Color' came to mind. However, when someone asks me how I make up words to say things that aren't necessarily true, I can't figure out how they do it. Perhaps I should have asked my chicken coop why.By putting a topic like 'If People Are Born, They'll Be Useless' in 'Political Writing' (as the article for that topic in Politics and Public Policy), I hope to establish a more healthy relationship between politics and poetry. I hope that there will be a growing interest in both poetry and politics, in writers of all political persuasions. That said, I am interest ed in all my subjects. For instance, if I were in a room full of writers and I asked each one to recommend three poems for me to read, I think I would be able to pick a number of choices that would come from their own life experiences, and not just their experiences as writers.(Note: I have since written about this topic.) One other thing about this, I like writing essays and I love magazines. However, there's a problem I've encountered: I get tired of reading the same old political writing, but then I read the same old political writing over again.