By now you've heard that the President proposed injecting disinfectant "inside" the body of COVID patients, and then shortly thereafter said he meant to inject the disinfected on "a stationary object," but then later defended himself by saying he was being "sarcastic," and then later claimed he was being misunderstood, before finally doubling down on the sarcasm defense.

As media outlets kept hitting me with only slightly different takes on this idiotic scene—while also doing the good work of revealing his close financial ties to China and his horrifying plans to scrap protections for LGBTQ patients—I was reminded of a line in Bob Hicok's "Building a Joke," which you can find in his book This Clumsy Living, available at local bookstores.

A few notes:

• Hicok's poem is a Dubya-era takedown of the way the previous Republican administration spun language to suit its own bloody purposes. But the poem can also be read as a critique of left-leaning media (The Daily Show, etc.), who obscured those bloody purposes by cracking jokes about superficial details and then skipping along their merry way. The speaker's inability to find the joke in Bush's warmongering feels suddenly relevant today, especially when the President's casual talk of toxins as cures has already killed and hospitalized his own fans:

A man goes to war with the same country
his father did. No. A man wears insulated pants.
Sorry. A man holds two cups of coffee
In one hand and one hand of poker
In the other hand and one
thermonuclear device in the other
other hand. I am trying.

• Commentators also made fun of the the Breitbart doofus who argued that the President didn't propose injecting patients with disinfectant, he was merely openly wondering if "medical doctors" could figure out a way to....inject patients with disinfectant. That's the moment I thought of the line that follows Hicok's brilliant riff on the way a man can use language to turn a "no" into a "yes," emphasis mine:

No is on turned around, the man thought,
and on is the first part of only,
and only means just a bit, and just a bit
isn’t too much, and not too much
is never enough, we need more
and more is yes and yes
is basically what no is telling me,
the man thought. A man
wants an entirely personal relationship
with semantics
.

• In the last jokey Friday poem post (the one about the higgledy piggledy poems), I asked if readers could write a truly sad double dactyl. Nobody took me up on the challenge of writing a tragedy with a comedic form, but Hicok comes close in the concluding line of this poem, when he turns a joke's set-up into a terrifying kicker: "Whenever a man / says knock-knock, don't ask, who's there?" The thesis here isn't so much that we should all be killjoys, I don't think—after all, it's a funny poem—but rather that we must be attentive to the way these assholes use jokes to breed complacency.

• Halfway through writing this post I remembered that Hicok got canceled for bemoaning the fact that white writers like himself were "disappearing" from the world of poetry because they weren't getting as many prizes as they used to, which was a supremely dumb argument that Timothy Yu efficiently dispatched in the New Republic. I hope Hicok read it and reflected and changed, and I hope you'll read it too.