What a filthy Presidentiad! —Walt Whitman, “To the States”
In August 2026 several sailors aboard the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, despondent over deteriorating conditions of hygiene on the ship after nearly nine months deployed without relief in the Arabian Sea in President Trump’s war on Iran, were reported to have attempted suicide.
1.
In 1943 France, during
the Nazi occupation, the poet
Francis Ponge began his book-length poem
in praise of soap. Awakening to the beauty,
not to mention necessity, of that
familiar cleansing agent by wartime
shortages he and his fellow resistance
fighters experienced at their rural
hideouts, Ponge hailed the humble bar of soap
as “Magic stone” and thoroughly, lovingly
detailed its dissolution through use
down to its voluble finish. Thus he made
his little book a shrine to the gift of
cleanliness we tend to take for granted.
2.
We may ask ourselves, what if there was a poet,
a Ponge on board the USS Abraham
Lincoln likewise honoring the objects
of that crew’s deprivations over months without
leave stationed in the Arabian Sea?
Running out of soap, deodorant, toothpaste,
enduring moldy showers and backed-up toilets
among the miseries that pushed a handful
of the five-thousand-plus men jammed into
that floating prison to literally jump ship
to end it, having also reached Ponge’s
conviction that there is nothing in nature
comparable to soap, would he have turned in
despair to the unsuds’d water of the sea?
3.
Ponge’s soap shortage came as a sacrifice
in the fight against German fascism, while
the sailors of the Abraham Lincoln suffered
only for a war of choice the president
engineered to distract from his other
crimes. In this he was surely following
the playbook of the fascists Ponge’s
generation paid so dearly to defeat,
of waging war against one’s own people.
No doubt the real injury to the men of
the Abraham Lincoln was the shortage of meaning
in their ordeal. Ship of shame left in neglect
by a president so filthy there’s not
enough soap on earth to scrub clean his name.
Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.
