Objection! Defending Charlie B

Poor Charlie B. Past the lips stained with alcohol and ever present cloud of smoke was a great man. He was a smart guy and understood humanity. He was brave enough to face the wrongs in our society head on. Let’s take the poem we read in class, “Dinosauria, We”. He confronts the issues he saw around him and then offered his audience a startling, yet possible, view of what our world could become.

The problems he brings up in “Dinosauria, We” are still present in our society. He referenced things above our control, like a college graduate working a minimum wage job and political injustice. But he also was able to identify wrongs that we can correct, like the lack of communication that occurs between people nowadays and the progression of unnecessary violence. It doesn’t seem that Bukowki cared about writing things that would be accepted or comfortable to read. He wrote in a straight forward way that forces his readers to face what is around them, and even ahead of them.

While Bukowski does make some crazy claims on what our society could turn into, I think it’s something to be admired. Even if our “this” doesn’t turn into the chaotic vision that Bukowski predicts, he still makes us think about the effects our decisions could have on the future. Do we want everything around us to be obliterated with nuclear warfare? Of course not. But if you think about it, this is a very likely possibility if we don’t change our ways. While Bukowski does say some outrageous things about what could lie ahead of us, he does this so that we can change the outcome.

So was Charles Bukowski a crazy drunk? For sure. But he was an intelligent one, who had a lot of important messages to give.