Politics & Power Quote by Randall Jarrell

Jarrell skewers a mental trick that keeps cynicism self-sealing: when reality contradicts a stereotype, we don’t revise the stereotype, we exile the counterexample. The “honest and intelligent politician” becomes an honorary non-politician, a loophole that lets the old contempt survive untouched. It’s not just a jab at elected officials; it’s an autopsy of how categories harden into prejudice even when evidence piles up against them.

The bite comes from the arithmetic. “A dozen, a hundred” is hyperbole with a purpose: Jarrell imagines the counterexamples multiplying to absurdity, enough to force a rethink, yet we still refuse. That’s the satire. The repetition of “we” is the darker move. He indicts the audience’s comfort in knowing “what politicians are like,” because that knowledge is less observation than identity: it’s the satisfying posture of being above the mess. If politics is defined as corruption, then anyone decent can’t count as political, and the public is spared the harder task of admitting that governance is complicated, contingent, and sometimes shaped by people trying.

Context matters: Jarrell wrote in an era when mass politics and mass media were converging, and “politician” was already sliding into synonym for operator. As a poet-critic, he’s allergic to lazy language. The line is a warning about how public talk becomes a kind of bad poetry: dead metaphors, fixed types, easy villains. Once “politician” is a slur, democracy becomes a punchline, and the punchline keeps voting for itself.