Doggerel of Knight: White, Not Right

An Assemblyman heroically named Knight

Took a stand not for Right, but for white

He passed out a poem

So we get to know ‘im

For politics of a wattage not too bright

Does anyone out there happen to know whether Kate Tufts likes limericks? She’s the 82-year-old Los Angeles woman who not long ago sold her house and belongings, raising $1.25 million to endow a poetry competition in honor of her late husband. The winner of the annual Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize gets a cool $50,000.

Or perhaps Kate would prefer a riff on Joyce Kilmer:

I think that I shall never dis’

A poem quite so lame as this

OK, so maybe I shouldn’t get my hopes up. But rest assured that the author of the little ditty that Assemblyman William K. (Pete) Knight of Palmdale passed out to some fellow Republican legislators last week won’t win any literary prizes either.

Let it be recorded that Knight, this 62-year-old retired Air Force fighter pilot and ex-mayor of Palmdale, has since apologized for any offense caused by the poem “I Love America.” It’s a parody that portrays illegal immigrants as freeloaders who somehow buy homes with welfare checks, drive “Chebbys,” have a “hobby. . . called breeding” and call upon the “white man race” to move to Mexico.

But what’s offensive about this poem isn’t just its substance, but its style. A copy was faxed my way. It begins:

I come for visit, get treated regal

So I stay, who care illegal?

Cross the border poor and broke,

Take bus, see customs bloke . . .

Bloke? When was the last time you heard somebody from south of the border call somebody a “bloke”? Bloke is, of course, British slang. Not Mexican, not Guatemalan, not Salvadoran. After all this hard work mimicking broken English, the author ruins it by yanking a synonym out of the rhyming dictionary.

With such wretched poetry as “I Love America,” it’s little wonder that Pat Buchanan frets that conservative America is losing “the culture war.” Time was when xenophobia inspired better verse. Consider Bret Harte’s classic work of the 1870s, “Plain Language from Truthful James,” in which “Ah Sin, the Heathen Chinee” cheats Truthful James and Bill Nye in a card game.

Then I looked up at Nye,

And he gazed upon me;

And he rose with a sigh,

And said, ‘Can this be?’

We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,--

And he went for the heathen Chinee

So racist stereotyping needn’t be so artless. And to Harte’s credit, it should be noted that one reason for Nye’s fury was that Nye himself, his sleeve “stuffed full of aces,” had intended to rip off Ah Sin. The irony of this--of one cheater outclassed by another--was utterly lost on Truthful James.

It’s interesting that, some 120 years later, the doggerel that Knight finds amusing makes no acknowledgment of immigrants, legal or otherwise, as a source of cheap labor, but focuses on the welfare exploitation. Anybody driving by a day labor gathering site can see people hungry for work--and that’s not to say that all day laborers are illegal immigrants. Caricature that it is, “I Love America” ignores the fact that illegal immigrants are not entitled to welfare. Their children who are born here are so entitled but, whether or not Knight likes it, those kids are U.S. citizens by birth.

Having strayed from literary criticism, let’s take a closer look at the poem’s dubious substance. One is its assumption that the illegal immigrant--a lawbreaker, after all--is a soul of low moral character. The illegal immigrant I know best--let’s just say I’ll never be U.S. attorney general--refuses to go on welfare although she and her husband (a legal immigrant) work menial jobs and have three young Americans to raise.

But what’s worse--and where Knight really hurts his own cause--is the way this doggerel attempts to polarize the issues of immigration and welfare in ethnic terms. Just what are we to make of this: “We think America damn good place/Too damn good for white man race.”

Now, being one myself, it’s easy to empathize with straight white guys who feel put upon by “affirmative action” programs, the women’s movement, gay rights. In an interview with The Times’ Mark Gladstone after the poetry flap, Knight said that if he were Assembly Speaker he’d abolish the Legislature’s various racial and ethnic caucuses and mused about why there “isn’t an American caucus.”

I wonder what Knight’s American caucus would look like. Would it resemble the America that Maya Angelou described in the ode to America’s heritage that she delivered during President Clinton’s inauguration? Perhaps you remember this passage:

. . . So say the Asian , the Hispanic, the Jew

The African, the Native American, the Sioux,

The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,

The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik . . .

And so on. Now, Angelou strained a bit to pluck the verse out of diversity, but she was plainly more interested in substance than style. Her poem also acknowledged gays, the homeless and the privileged. Pete Knight and his heritage were probably described four or five times. Mine was.

Now, I’m quite sure that Pete Knight was as honest and ingenuous as Truthful James when he told Gladstone: “‘I am not racist by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t mean to offend anyone.” He says the poem seemed like a clever, funny way to call attention to some serious issues. And I’m glad he says he won’t get ulcers over the criticism.

But Pete Knight should realize there are many American caucuses, and though he was elected to serve on one, he can pretty much forget about taking a leadership role in discussions over immigration and welfare. It’s good to remember that on the day that Knight took the immigration debate a step back into race-baiting, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was urging the U.S. Justice Department to develop a strategy for stemming the tide of illegal immigration. Her concern wasn’t welfare fraud, but the cost of incarcerating illegal immigrants who are jailed awaiting trials and imprisoned following convictions. Yes, even Democrats like Feinstein understand that not all illegal immigrants are of high moral character--and that serious issues deserve serious talk.

Something else happened that day. Rita Dove, a professor at the University of Virginia, was selected as the U.S. poet laureate. As the Washington Post suggested, Dove was a politically correct appointment: “She’s not only a good poet, but energetic, female and black. . . . “ And, incidentally, married to a German novelist.

Not surprisingly, Dove has explored racial issues in her work. From “Genetic Expedition”:

. . . My child has

her father’s hips, his hair

like the miller’s daughter, combed gold.

Though her lips are mine, housewives

stare when we cross the parking lot

because of that ghostly profusion.

Definitely P.C.

Poetically correct, I mean.