Having The Flu And With Nothing Else To Do - Analysis

Flu-time clarity: a political pattern the speaker can’t unsee

The poem’s central claim is blunt: in American public life, ideological change is rewarded when it moves rightward, and punished when it refuses to. The speaker, stuck at home having the flu with nothing else to do, reads about John Dos Passos and treats that biographical trajectory as a symptom of a larger social rule. The flu matters because it puts him in a stripped-down, impatient state: there’s no scene-setting, no softening. One book anecdote becomes a diagnosis.

Dos Passos is presented almost like a cautionary diagram: once radical-communist, then living off investments in the Hollywood Hills, then reading the Wall Street Journal. Those details aren’t neutral; they’re a small catalog of class comfort and institutional belonging. The speaker’s bitter refrain this seems to happen all too often isn’t really about one writer’s choices so much as about how predictably the culture funnels energy into respectability.

The one-way escalator: acceptable change versus unacceptable change

The poem sets up a strong asymmetry: what hardly ever happens is the conversion that runs against the grain, a man going from being a young conservative to an old wild-ass radical. The phrase wild-ass is important: it’s mocking, but it’s also affectionate, as if the speaker wants to salvage a kind of late-life moral courage that he rarely sees. In contrast, Young conservatives always seem to become old conservatives is delivered like a dreary law of physics. The metaphor lifelong mental vapor-lock makes conservatism feel less like a reasoned position than like a stalled engine: a failure of motion.

A key tension is that the speaker criticizes rigidity and yet speaks in sweeping absolutes. Always, hardly ever, all too often: the poem distrusts fixed minds, but it also leans on fixed patterns. That contradiction doesn’t weaken the poem; it reveals the speaker’s mood. He isn’t offering a balanced political science lecture. He’s describing the claustrophobia of watching the same story repeat until it starts to feel inevitable.

Who gets called crazy: the policing of “old radical” loyalty

The poem’s sharpest accusation arrives when it flips from personal development to public punishment. If a young radical becomes an old radical, the reaction is not admiration for consistency but suspicion: the critics and the conservatives treat him as if he escaped from a mental institution. The insult isn’t aimed at the radical; it’s aimed at the gatekeepers who get to define sanity. The poem implies that mainstream respectability depends on calling certain commitments pathological, especially when those commitments persist beyond youthful phasehood.

Notice how the speaker pairs critics with conservatives. That pairing suggests the enforcement isn’t only political; it’s cultural and reputational. The poem treats critics as part of the same machinery that normalizes drift toward money and punishes stubborn dissent. In that light, Dos Passos isn’t just a person; he’s an example of what gets rewarded: comfort, investment income, the symbolic daily reading of a market Bible.

The “turn”: from diagnosis to refusal

The tone pivots from sardonic analysis to outright rejection in the final lines. Such is our politics lands like a weary summary, but then comes the refusal: and you can have it all. Keep it. The poem stops trying to persuade and starts trying to detach. That detachment, though, immediately breaks into contempt: Sail it up your Ass. The vulgarity is not decoration; it’s the speaker’s way of ending a conversation he believes has been rigged. If the only “mature” direction allowed is toward the Wall Street Journal, then the speaker chooses immaturity on purpose: a final, bodily veto.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If an old wild-ass radical is treated as insane, and a former radical who ends up in the Hollywood Hills is treated as normal, what does that say about the culture’s definition of adulthood? The poem’s anger implies an unsettling answer: that sanity is measured less by coherence or ethics than by whether your life story ends in alignment with money.