Our Twitter Commander

Richard Kenney, Poet

Wikipedia

I had a wild thought just now that if I were to insult our current president of these United States and get him to tweet an insult in return, I'd gain the notoriety I need to bring publicity to myself and my writings!

What sparked that wild thought was a poem by Richard Kenney, whom I encountered today in Nicholas Kristof's NYT column, "To Reject Trump the Perverse, Poets Wage a Battle in Verse," (February 9, 2017). Kenney's a poet at the University of Washington, and here are two stanzas of his poem:

We mustn't slander our Twitter Commander,
he'll burble our bird and snatch our bander
and fire off a tweet with his hot little hand, or
maybe report us, so stay discreet—

Commander in Tweet! Commander in Tweet!
Muster the army, commission the fleet!
He's a patsy for Putin, buffoon complete—
(And that old Constitution? Hit Delete—)

Those are pretty good lines, especially with the two allusions to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky! I wish I had time to come up with an insulting poem of my own. Borrowing lines from Kenney probably won't get Trump's attention directed towards me, but I'll bet that Kenney is getting that good old 'bad' publicity for himself.

By the way, none of this blog post should be taken as meaning that I do or do not support President Trump, the title of Kristof's column notwithstanding, but I do wish Trump would refrain from saying everything that comes into his head. Oddly enough, Obama had the same problem. Neither of them seems to recognize the virtue of silence, keeping one's own counsel, and not thinking out loud.