Spoilers




I’ve been thinking a lot today about Back to the Future.
My cousin loved that movie. Loves. (I’m sure
he hasn’t changed his mind. He never did.)
To me, the whole thing felt too Hollywood.

We saw it that final summer of croquet –
no genteel pastime the way we teens played it.
We made the course a battlefield, the hoops
stuck into tree roots, sideways on steep slopes,
or deep in puddles. And when a guy got knocked,
that ball would fly!
                               He felt the movie was perfect,
and proved that any man could change his life
by showing guts, the way George flattens Biff:
I found this feeble. The bully’d beat him up.
No shame in that. It still would stop the rape.
To change the way your life is going to go
you only have to tell the bully No.

Most of the MAGA mob, I’ll bet, are fans:
what are their loud Agains but time machines?
Today they’ve gone back 60 years to send
the National Guard to conquer movieland,
L.A.  We’re told that that’s how long it’s been
since a deployment over the objection
of a state’s governor. In the wrong-turn Sixties –  
the drugs, the DEI, the promiscuity –
the troops were sent to Selma to protect
the marchers. That’s the error they correct
today, employing righteous U.S. force
to put the protests down, to keep the peace.
Somewhere, while reading about this executive action,
my cousin downs a beer with satisfaction.

I want to DeLorean back to those summer lawns
on which our only problems were the ones
we set up as a game. I want to sock
ol’ Time in the chops and lay it flat and make
this future what it was back when I loved him.

Max Gutmann

If you have any thoughts about this poem, Max Gutmann  would like to hear them