Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is an accomplished man. Not only is he guiding the war in Iraq, he has been a pilot, a congressman, an ambassador, a businessman, and a civil servant. But few Americans know that he is also a poet.
Until now, the secretary's poetry has found only a small and skeptical audience: the Pentagon press corps. Every day, Rumsfeld regales reporters with his jazzy, impromptu riffs. Few of them seem to appreciate it.
...
The Unknown As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
-Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
...
The Digital Revolution Oh my goodness gracious,
What you can buy off the Internet
In terms of overhead photography!
A trained ape can know an awful lot
Of what is going on in this world,
Just by punching on his mouse
For a relatively modest cost!
-June 9, 2001, following European trip
Etc. Lovely job by Slate writer Hart Seely there. Would he be qualified to be America's Poet Laureate or whatever, seeing that the White House got antsy when they planned that big poetry colloquium right around the beginning of the war, and it was clear that some of those attending would be expressing a difference of opinion from that of The Powers That Be... Not so with ol' Rummy, I'm sure you can imagine. Not to get all acrimonious on ya'll... posted by Steve
4/22/2003 06:15:00 PM
Want more coagulated brilliance? (And
who doesn't?) Then go to the
archives and
read the oldies to your heart's content. Don't like this blog? Click
here to move
on to another... Come on back now, ya hear?