Non-Poetry-Reading Conservatives

 There's a meme which you've probably encountered: the NPC.

NPC stands for "non-playing character" and is drawn from computer games. If you try to interact with a non-playing character, they will just repeat the same lines over and over.

The meme was used to satirize liberals and progressives as mindless parrots.

My own twist on the meme is the NPRC: the Non-Poetry Reading Conservative.

The Non-Poetry Reading Conservative is disdainful towards millennials, Generation Z, and young people in general because (he says) they spend all day on TikTok and social media, while he actually Reads Books.

Of course, he doesn't read poetry. I mean, he's read it at school, and that should be enough. Now and again he might read an anthology. He thinks it should rhyme and scan and it should be memorized at school but he will never actually read it.

The NPRC thinks he's going against the cultural tide, but he's really drifting on exactly the same cultural tide as his contemporaries in ignoring poetry. He frequently quotes G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and other conservative icons of the past. It doesn't occur to him that they would be horrified at a generation that never reads poetry.

If this seems bitter...well, it is. If it seems inflammatory, it's meant to be.

Don't be an NPRC!