dubya

[Lear's Fool]

Mark David Tristan Brenchley wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Poetry Provider wrote:
> 
> > MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
> > by George W. Bush
> >
> > I think we all agree,
> > the past is over.
> >
> > This is still a dangerous world.
> > It's a world of madmen
> > And uncertainty
> > And potential mental losses.
> >
> > Rarely is the question asked
> > Is our children learning?
> > Will the highways of
> > the internet
> > Become more few?
> > How many hands
> > Have I shaked?
> >
> > They misunderestimate me.
> > I am a pitbull on the pantleg
> > of opportunity.
> > I know that the human being
> > and the fish
> > Can coexist.
> > Families is where our nation
> > Finds hope,
> > Where our wings take dream.
> >
> > Put food on you family!
> > Knock down the tollbooth!
> > Vulcanize Society!
> > Make the pie higher!
> > Make the pie higher!
> > Major league.
> >
> >
> >
> > There was no poetry at the U.S. presidential inaugural January 20. The
> > Washington Post stepped into the void on Sunday. The following poem is
> > composed entirely of actual
> > quotes from George W., arranged by Post writer Richard Thompson
> >
> > all semblance of intelligence has been dubbed out
> >
> > poem kindly provided by tim maguire

I am reminded of Easter 1916, a poem by William Butler
Yeats, 

"I have met them..."

I have met them marching, fist-raising, loud-talking, forms
of resistance
black and powerful, marching on the landscapes of language
that is "america the beautiful." Black is beautiful and
proud and powerful, the  language in your face and on your
white shoes shinning where your intellectual elite meets,
planning, designing Reform, reform to acculturate, to polish
and shine those black voices into a brown shoed dominant
ideology, oppress with a buffing, a little english english
on it. Researches and scholars, and intellectuals waiting to
shine, to shine these voices, these linguistics, these
cultures  oppressed. But separate but equal. But separate
and equal, only  cognitively  but socially unequal. Unequal
to what? To an arm-chair philosophy of language. Unequal
too, to the legitimacy afforded the culture oppressed.
Without concomitantly articulating the legitimacy, the
equality of speech, 
how can an the intellectual, a scholar, a researcher, a
teacher, affirm the cultures oppressed? How can we affirm a
person's right to their own language, their own patterns and
varieties of language, the dialects nurtured by their
Mothers in their formative years (Bush lived in China for a
while I think and in Texas, maybe he had Chinese "mother" or
what in linguistics is now called "separate but equal
development," his data was mixed. Many brilliant
politicians, one thinks of Churchill, have a learning
disability or speech impediment,  not  the same thing as
being stupid or having a low IQ or low SAT scores--Bush, a
box of rocks with marbles in his mouth scored higher on the
SAT than Dollar Bill and Bill Clinton, two intellectuals,
Rhode's Scholars, not that SAT and IQ mean aren't nonsense
anyway). A Nation proud of its diversity, its diverse
heritage and its cultural and racial variety must not seek
to rub off the heritage of dialects and buff away the beauty
that is america the beautiful, even if don't but nobody know
what he's sayin and what really happen bout it. 

Sluggishly Yours, 

Mary Anne Gra,