Blog-ojevich

One of the uses of literature (not that it has to always Have an Obvious Use) is to help people cultivate their stores of empathy and fellow feeling. It can remind us of the humanity and struggles of those who might not at first glimpse have much in common with ourselves. One of the individuals who most people, at least in Illinois, probably hope they do not have too much in common with is our amazingly sucky governor, Rod Blagojevich.

For years, he’s been little more than a cartoon of a man whose ridiculousness rivaled only his capacity to disappoint the people he was supposed to serve. But back in September 2002, Chicago Public Radio’s Steve Edwards spoke to the then-gubernatorial-hopeful in an interview where the idea was to have the candidate talk anything but politics. So they discussed his love of jogging and his prodigious skills of memorization, which he demonstrated both by listing various U S Presidents in order, and by reciting the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, which he cited as a kind of personal motto. Part of it goes:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

Somehow, listening to this interview being rebroadcast on CPR’s Eight Forty-Eight program during a show called “Illinois Politics Is Bleepin’ Golden,” creepy, comic book villain G-Rod suddenly seemed sad, touching, human to me. Maybe this is just because I was surprised to see him publicly valuing something I also value? Or maybe it’s yet more evidence that art that is supposed to better us can be appropriated for insidious ends regardless of its uplifting content? Anyway, nice poem, Blago.