March 23rd, 2009 / 5:21 pm
I Like __ A Lot
I like Donald Rumsfeld a lot
In 2003 (sorry I’m late) Hart Seely, a reporter and occasional humorist, arranged Donald Rumsfeld’s evasive paradox-ridden Pentagon briefings and media interviews into poems, collected in Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. Political satire is not new territory, but this is just awesome. Here is an example:
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.Department of Defense news briefing
Feb. 12, 2002
A great move by Seely, but what struck me even more so was how strange Rumsfeld’s mind worked. I can’t decide if this is Kant or autism. The following are quotes from him:
“I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.”
“Osama Bin Laden is either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive.”
“I believe what I said yesterday. I don’t know what I said, but I know what I think, and, well, I assume it’s what I said.”
“There’s another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
Imagine you had lies inside you, but that the truth – or at least the semblance of it – had to somehow come out of your mouth. You couldn’t really say anything substantive, but what you said had to be dense; and it would have to technically be rational, yet oblique and vague enough to be immune to accountability. You had to dismiss questions by supplying words which sounded, even felt, like answers — concepts so redundant yet complex, one had difficulty understanding if they understood it. By the time one realized all this ‘reasonableness’ actually didn’t make any sense, you would be long gone, gnawing on some jerky in a limousine somewhere. And you had to improvise this every day, form new ways of saying old things.
Rumsfeld’s agenda for which such (anti?) rhetoric was employed was at best questionable, but this post is not about politics. His tranquilizing craft of words was brilliant, mentally numbing. I like Donald Rumsfeld a lot.
Tags: Donald Rumsfeld
“There’s another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
That is actually clear, rational, and slightly beautiful.
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March 23rd, 2009 / 9:22 pmMatt Cozart—
I think I heard someone say this on Law & Order or The X-Files or Nova. Or something else on t.v.
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Rumsfeld is brilliant.
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March 23rd, 2009 / 8:35 pmSteven Trull—
I like his penciled mustache.
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March 23rd, 2009 / 9:43 pmKen Baumann—
To clarify: Brilliant and evil.
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I wish I could write poetry the way he lies to the global community and induces the slaughter and pillaging of nations.
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March 24th, 2009 / 3:46 amdaniel bailey—
i wish i could slaughter and pillage nations and have it published as a book
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known unknowns
unknown unknowns
that stuff’s great, etc.
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i don’t know whether f this makes me laugh or feel really sad or nothing at all
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i think it makes me feel confused, or ambivalent
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This makes me feel like everything’s still fucked but in a comfortable, detached way.
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maybe
ultimately, kind of funny
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The man could talk some trash. I guess that’s better than eating it.
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‘vapid’
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I think the “unknowns” thing is the one thing he ever said that made any sense. It’s absolutely sound reasoning. Also, in Zizek’s _Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle_ there’s a great theme where he expands and develops Rumsfeld’s remarks. He introduces the category of the “unknown known,” ie “what we do not know we know,” by which he means repression (in the psychological sense) but operating at the level of the whole society– he’s talking about things like torture, that we pretend to be shocked by when a new story breaks, as if we didn’t all already understand at some level that this is the way governments and militaries have always operated and always will.
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Also,
Sherri: She was looking at Nelson!
Kids: [taunting] Lisa likes Nelson!
Milhouse: She does not!
Kids: [taunting] Milhouse likes Lisa!
Janey: He does not!
Kids: [taunting] Janey likes Milhouse!
Uter: She does not!
Kids: [taunting] Uter likes Milhouse!
Mr. Largo: Nobody likes Milhouse!
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some one gave me this book. i wasn’t amused.
it is a shame too. one of my favorite things of the 2000s was to watch rumsfeld clown reporters in televised briefings.
it is the only time i have watched anything to do with our government.
that guy has a gift. he can make mother theresa look stupid.
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Rumsfeld clowning reporters was pretty cool but so easy for him that it ceased being fun to watch.
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this is awesome, jimmy
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[...] authored by her. He compares these ‘collaborative’ poems (see related Rumsfeld poetry post) with Lohan’s lyrics, easily establishing the former’s more literary sensibilities [...]