I was going to write about this inane Don Cherry "controversy," but Bob at Let It Bleed, Jaeger at Trudeaupia (permalink broken -- scroll down to "Cheese Eating Visor Wearers") and Bruce at Autonomous Source have covered the territory nicely. Besides, I have other fish to fry.
John Kerry has won the Michigan and Washington primaries. He must be stopped.
This is from his official website (scroll down about one-third of the page):
In Boston, Kerry and I are discussing his poetry, a longtime and private avocation. He begins buoyantly. "I don't claim to be a poet at all; I just like the expression, the form of it," he tells me. "I like Pablo Neruda, who's a great romantic. I like all the Romantics: Percy Shelley and Byron and Keats. I like Kipling; I like to mimic some of that doggerelish stuff. Oh, gosh, obviously Yeats. [. . .]"
Impressive stuff, huh?
Shows gravitas, eh?
Not so fast, bub
Let's go, as they say,
to the tape
Or failing that, the Weekly Standard:
And now John Kerry--a man with the finest education American private schools can offer, a man of the world who winters in Aspen and summers in Nantucket--has descended into doggerel under pressure of his frontrunner status. "Like father, like son / One term only / And Bush is done," he chanted at campaign stops last week. Well, two can play at that game. How about "IGNORE THE BORE IN 2004"? "BE WARY OF KERRY"? The possibilities are endless. If we could just figure out a rhyme for Nantucket . . .
OK, you're thinking, he's probably going for the Jesse Jackson rhymin' moron vote. But wait, it gets worse.
Back in June of last year, Andy Lamey of the National Post had a funny column on what's been called "trophy poetry" -- poems by people who are famous for something else entirely, and decide that they need to burnish their Renaissance Man image by writing terrible poetry. I blogged about it here.
Unfortunately the link to Lamey's piece has long since expired; but I had the foresight to preserve one of Kerry's "poems" for posterity:
I had a talk with a deer today
we had a talk on the road some way . . . between his frequent snorts
he asked me if I sought his pelt
cause if I did he said he felt
quite out of sorts.
This would be described, in technical terms, as "godawful."
Neruda? I don't see it. Yeats? Not likely.
Kerry seems to think he's Robert freakin' Frost!
I think that the Republicans are well positioned to exploit the "Poetry Gap," since, as luck would have it, they've got a pretty good little poet in George W. Bush, who just last fall penned the immortal Ode to Laura, on the Occasion of Her Grand Tour of the Continent:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Oh my lump in the bed
How I've missed youRoses are redder
Bluer am I
Seeing you kissed by that charming French guyThe dogs and the cat, they missed you too
Barney's still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe
The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier
Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier
Sure, it's dopey, but then Dubya's kind of dopey, too.
It's also sweet and really quite witty. Ogden Nash he ain't, but he ain't half-bad.