Groundswell
Groundswell
by David Rutter
Ol’ Fat Coltrane
Sick hypnotist
Everybody’s doing it
Doctor Marvelous
Pancreatic faithfulness
Be cooler than your friends
Verboten lambs
Proudly prohibited
All your favorites are here
Al Einstein, Jr.
Knowledge is limited
Get your’s today
Baba Cancer
Extinction contagion
Be the first on your block
Warren Arthritis
Satellite syndrome
Don’t be left out
Father Parrot Confusion
Hemorrhage massage
Get ‘me while they last
The groundswell has started
Look sharp
Don’t question
Time to get aboard
Follow the leader
Whoever it is
If you don’t
Somebody else will
Getting down to the end, the poem’s directive becomes clear: “get aboard/follow the leader whoever it is;” that is, mindlessly, because everybody’s doing it and “knowledge is limited.” But this is some kind of contagion, as indicated by the disease imagery. The “groundswell” is a spreading cancer of accepting what one is told to think, rather than thinking things out on one’s own. “Be cooler than your friends” means to be among the first to expound whatever new ideas are in vogue; which leads ironically, one would imagine, to a nonsensical quagmire.
how, pray tell, can an idea be new when it’s already *in vogue*?
cerebella, because they are the current fashionable new ideas, those already put out there as cool to proclaim as one’s own. “the first on your block.”
i can’t say that makes ‘a new idea being in vogue’ any less oxymoronic. that’s just marketing. i think it’s the idea of having a new idea that is attractive.