Ozymandias

Okay , I will confess that my use of  my next favorite poem Shelley’s OZYMANDIAS in the wisdom of hindsight may be a bit over-the-top. In the wake of George Bush II the seconds ill advised and ineptly run assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in search of weapons of destruction that did not exist, well the facts were wrong and the advice was worse. I thought at the time he would go down in history as one of our worst presidents by far. Needless to say given what we have in the White House at the present makes Bush look a whole lot better. And added to that when he left the office he refused in good conscience to turn around and say one single word against Obama who followed him. I would say on that alone he was and is an honorable former president

You have a bad toothache and its a few days before you can see the dentist. It hurts and you find your tongue unconsciously reaching for the spot and it hurts even more. Mrs. T dropped me off at the barbershop in Rochester and after finishing my business and still awaiting her return,  I headed around the corner for something to do.  Thus,  I found myself in the Goodwill store  picking up a few books at a super bargain price.  There was the classic The Call of the Wild by Jack London read long ago as a teenager. Then I found The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Having recently read her new novel Flight Behavior I wanted more.  The State of Denial by Bob Woodward was next to be dropped in the basket.  Yes it was the later that caused the pain. I knew it would be painful to read yet  I still took it home.  After reading the book I decided that  it was Woodward  who was in a State Of Denial about his two earlier sycophantic books about the Bush II administration. He appeared to be trying to make up for previous blunders.  It was  sort of a  novelistic, gossipy, fly on the wall type of documentary reporting.  The book also  contained a lot of trivia (did we really need to know Bush and Cheney liked to trade fart jokes at important meetings) , yet it also brought forth  an  overpowering indictment of the arrogance and incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney,What a tragic farce it all was…..

The book was published praised and condemned in 2006. I had already intuited much of what was going on and being covered up in Iraq before this book came out.  In one of the few “political” posts I ever put on Troutbirder I came up with the following post.  Rather than discuss this poorly written book and its ultimate truths about the Iraq war, I’ll simply repeat what I wrote then…….

It is said that the great English poet Shelley was

visiting the British Museum in London when he

and his wife Mary (the author of Frankenstein)

came upon a relic of Ramses II. Stolen from

Egypt it remains in the museum today. This allegedly
inspired him to write Ozymandis. One of my
all-time favorite poems:

"I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them,

on the sand,Half sunk,

a shattered visage lies,

whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer

of cold command.

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,Which yet survive,

stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them,

and the heart that fed,

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains.Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck,

boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I think this spare poem will stand well in the future quite well for our autocrat loving and cowardly president who will reside alone in the trash can of failed  American presidents