Sunday, July 12, 2015

Michael Ceraolo- A Poem


Modern Olympian Ode #5 (1904):  Anthropology Days

Both the 1900 games in Paris
and the above ones in St. Louis
were small sideshows at their respective World's Fairs
rather than being main events,
and such obscurity almost doomed the Olympic movement
And it would have merited doom too,
for the sideshow within a sideshow
that went by the name Anthropology Days

Though there is only one race,
the human race,
divided up into thousands of ethnicities,
ethnicity in this case
being defined by language,
other ways of classifying ethnicity
have been a mania for many
(such classifications mistakenly called races),
and there have been few if any
sorrier attempts at such insanity
than the one that took place here

Pygmies
Mexican Indians
Syrians
Turks
Filipinos
Patagonians
Ainu
and numerous other groups,
none of them trained athletes,
were picked to participate
in the first and worst 'Special Olympics',
designed to empirically demonstrate
'white' athletic superiority
But,
in an instance of poetic justice,
the anthropologist,
who deserves eternal anonymity,
didn't feel he had gathered sufficient 'data'
to draw any conclusions from his study

Thou Shalt Not Commit a Pseudo-Science
 
 

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