A real mind-blower

In today’s NY Times arts section, it says that an Eli Lilly heir (aged 87) is planning to leave $100 million to Poetry magazine. Far be it for me to denigrate poetry, except for the modern stuff that makes me want to bang my head repeatedly against a wall, but speaking of people who actually do that, wasn’t Eli Lilly the company that got Trent Lott to sneak a provision into the Heimat Security Bill letting it off the hook for a drug that may cause autism? (OK, the banging against the wall thing wasn’t the greatest segue, but it’s the best I can do at 4:30 in the morning. Still, that sentence had a sort of poetically complex structure to it, huh?) I’m just wondering if there isn’t a better use for Eli Lilly money, is all I’m saying, unpoetic justice if you will. The highly literate response of the poet laureate of the United States to this news: “It’s a real mind-blower.” The magazine pays $2 a line, which makes $100 million a shitload of poetry (actually I think the correct plural is “an iambic of poetry” or possibly “a pretentiousness of poetry”). Of course they may just blow it all on a crash project to find a word that rhymes with orange.

Further on what I said 2 days ago about the almost-third-person way GeeDubya now uses to refer to himself: from a Bob Woodward interview: "I'm the kind of person that wants to make sure that all risk is assessed."

From the same interview, on spreading light and love and reason throughout the world using genocidal force if necessary: "And if the values are good enough for our people, they ought to be good enough for others, not in a way to impose because these are God-given values. These aren't United States-created values. These are values of freedom and the human condition and mothers loving their children."

Bush’s attempt to include as a tripwire in the UN resolution a clause that the US has decided to interpret to mean that Iraq can’t shoot at our planes in the no-fly zone anymore, was laughed into oblivion by the entire rest of the world including Kofi Annan and astonishingly even Britain.

Bush keeps talking about war crimes trials for Iraqi leaders, but presumably not for those he intends to put in charge of a puppet government, like General Nizar Khazraji, just arrested for war crimes by Denmark.

Iran just released 20 Iraqi prisoners from the 1980-8 war, isn’t that sweet?