Go to the Protest Strapped, like Catullus
Let’s workshop this poem that, falling in the invective tradition of Catullus, takes an absurd ethical position (blaming descendants for ancestral sins) and turns it around on those who weaponize it
scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
*“Catullus 16” is the paradigm example of obscene invective from Catullus, who lived from 84 BC to 54 BC. I write this poem in honor of him. He made doing Latin translation fun!
Go to the Protest Strapped, like Catullus If a gorilla blames you for the supposed sins of your ancestors (stolen land, slave rape), nonsense (but hey, gorilla blood), blame him for his mother’s sin: that cum-guzzler cunt, that unbeweaveable baboon, clearly having rutted her hog furrow across the species line.
"Go to the Protest Strapped, like Catullus" is an incendiary and deeply transgressive poem that deliberately adopts an extreme, offensive ethical stance to critique the weaponization of ancestral blame. Falling squarely into the **invective tradition of Catullus**, it uses shock value, crude language, and a provocative reversal of accusations to achieve its rhetorical aim. The poem's power lies in its willingness to descend into the grotesque to make a pointed, albeit controversial, argument about accountability and historical grievance.
Formally, the poem is terse and aggressive, employing direct address and a stark, unadorned vocabulary. The title immediately establishes the poem's lineage: "Go to the Protest Strapped, like Catullus" invokes the Roman poet's notorious use of personal attacks and sharp wit, while "Strapped" carries a double entendre of being prepared for confrontation, both verbally and physically. The poem sets up a hypothetical scenario: "If a gorilla blames you / for the supposed sins of your ancestors / (stolen land, slave rape)," presenting serious, historically charged accusations. The sudden pivot in the third stanza is the poem's central rhetorical maneuver: "nonsense (but hey, gorilla blood), / blame him for his mother’s sin: / that cum-guzzler cunt, / that unbeweaveable baboon, / clearly having rutted her hog furrow / across the species line." This graphic and highly offensive counter-attack is a deliberate act of **inversion and escalation**. The parenthetical "but hey, gorilla blood" sarcastically acknowledges the premise of ancestral blame, before immediately applying it to the accuser in a crude and dehumanizing manner. The language is designed to provoke, using bestial and sexual slurs to reduce the "gorilla" (the accuser) to a figure of primal, amoral depravity.
Thematically, the poem engages with the contentious issue of **intergenerational guilt and historical grievance**, particularly as it relates to contemporary social justice discourse. The "absurd ethical position" it adopts is the literal application of ancestral blame: if one is to be held accountable for the "sins of your ancestors," then, the poem provocatively asks, why can't that same logic be applied indiscriminately to anyone, including the accuser? The invective serves not as a genuine moral argument, but as a **reductio ad absurdum**, pushing the premise of inherited guilt to a repugnant extreme to expose what the poem perceives as its inherent illogic or hypocrisy when weaponized. By blaming the "gorilla" for its "mother’s sin" involving "species line" transgression, the poem implicitly critiques the idea that genetic or racial lineage automatically confers moral culpability or the right to accuse. It's a brutal, offensive, and dangerous attempt to strip the moral authority from those who levy accusations of ancestral sin by mirroring and escalating the very logic they employ. The poem forces a confrontation with the ugliness that can emerge when complex historical grievances are reduced to simplified, weaponized accusations and counter-accusations.
invective, Catullus, ancestral guilt, intergenerational blame, historical grievance, social commentary, satire, provocation, taboos, offensive language, dehumanization, reductio ad absurdum, moral absurdity, weaponization, accountability, race, identity politics.