You Can Be A Republican Im A Genocrat - Analysis

A political joke that is really about generations

The title’s mock-platform, You Can Be a Republican, I’m a Genocrat, gives away the poem’s central move: it pretends to talk party identity, but it is really a manifesto of age. The speaker isn’t choosing a civic ideology; he’s choosing a cohort. His repeated praise of rorty (a quaint word he defines as fine, splendid, jolly) is more than a vocabulary gag. It becomes his badge of membership in an older world where words feel stable, manners legible, and conversation possible.

Under the jaunty rhymes, the main claim is blunt: the speaker finds the young not merely annoying but almost unintelligible, and he wants refuge in older company. The poem’s humor is the sugar coating for a real exhaustion—social, linguistic, and parental.

Rorty as a lifeboat in melancholy

The poem begins with a small confession that complicates the comedy: the word rorty returns to him In moments melancholy. That detail suggests he is not only mocking youth; he is soothing himself with a relic. When he declares, I think it rorty / To be with people over forty, the preference sounds like comfort-seeking, not just snobbery. The old-fashioned word is a charm against sadness, and older people—who might recognize it, or at least tolerate it—become part of that charm.

There’s a quiet contradiction embedded here: he frames his choice as jolly, but he reaches for it when he feels low. The poem keeps insisting on cheer while repeatedly revealing fatigue.

From annoyance to incomprehension: the youth as a foreign language

As the ages tick upward—over fifty, over sixty—the speaker’s complaint shifts from preference to communicative breakdown. He describes The pidgin talk the youthful use and says their code bypasses conversation. That phrasing is telling: the issue is not slang itself, but the fear that language has stopped being a shared public space. Youth speech becomes encryption; the speaker is locked out.

He even turns his own body into evidence of strain: I’ve tried to read young mumbling lips / Till I’ve developed a slant-eye, and his hearing gives out at the constant plea of If I can’t, why can’t I? The joke is exaggerated, but the emotion underneath is specific: he experiences youth as noise, speed, and perpetual argument—an endless demand to translate, explain, and referee.

The working parent’s night: jeeps, 3 A.M., and waiting up

The poem’s most grounded irritation arrives when the speaker invokes the household clock. The hours a working parent keeps / Mean less than Latin to them, he says, and the kids vanish in jeeps / Till three and four A.M. This is where the curmudgeon voice starts to look like a weary caretaker. The desire is not simply for older friends; it’s for relief from vigilance. He longs for people you pour a cup for rather than people you have to wait up for, a domestic contrast that makes his politics of age feel like a politics of sleep, responsibility, and worry.

Notice the tension: he wants company, yet the company he wants is defined by not needing him. Youth drains; age, in his fantasy, doesn’t ask.

Old names as a loyalty test: Hagen, Grange, Dempsey

When he complains that the young don’t know Hagen from Bobby Jones and have never heard of Al Smith, he is really describing a world without common reference points. These names function like passwords: if you recognize them, you belong to his time. If you don’t, you represent a cultural amnesia that feels personally insulting. The poem is funny about it—Even Red Grange is beyond their range—but the underlying anxiety is that history is not cumulative; it simply drops off behind the young like a shed skin.

His longing to gabble upon the shoulder / Of someone my own age is not just nostalgia. It is a wish for effortless context, the comfort of not explaining why a name should matter.

The comic climax: wanting a centenarian, wanting silence

By the end, the speaker has worked himself into delighted extremity: after being tired of defining hadn’t oughts and calling youthful thoughts long long thoughts—a phrase that makes their seriousness sound both grand and foolish—he announces he’d like a companion aged one hundred. The escalation is the poem’s turn from plausible preference to impossible demand. It exposes the fantasy inside his complaint: he wants an age so advanced it guarantees peace.

The strangest, most revealing image comes earlier: a septuagenarian, / Silent upon a peak in Darien. Silence, not conversation, is the true prize. The poem’s final joke lands because it admits, indirectly, that what he calls sociability may really be a desire to stop negotiating with the present—and to sit with someone who will not ask, argue, or race away into the night.