LOS ANGELES: August kills poetry. For starters, it’s too hot. You can feel the days shrinking. You can sense changes coming. August devours poets. Maybe that’s what’s eating Donald Rumsfeld.
I refer to the secretary of defence, from whose throat spontaneous verses once poured. For years, Rumsfeld shared his idiosyncratic haiku with the nation during televised news conferences, while his hands made hypnotic kung fu gestures for the cameras.
Back then, in the salad days of the war on terror, Rumsfeld would romance every question, then uncork a response that might bob across an ocean and back. He discussed ‘chasing the chicken around the chicken yard’. He described Iraq as ‘an enormous country … bigger than Texas, or as big, I guess’. He noted the ‘unknown unknowns’, those intangibles that ‘we don’t know we don’t know’, the bumps that bedevil all those who launch silly things, like wars.
But lately, Rumsfeld has cut back on news conferences and, when fielding questions, generally avoids the chicken yard.
His last significant poem gushed forth in a July 31 briefing. Asked about the war in Lebanon, Rumsfeld offered what I have on his behalf titled, ‘Observations on Wasted Sunlight’: “It is what it is/What’s happened has happened/And the folks over there are sorting it out/And Condi and the president/Have both commented on it/That’s good enough for our country/Good to see you all/Why are you all not out there/In the sun, getting a suntan?”
If Rumsfeld that day was musing about some far-off beach, who could blame him? In recent weeks, he’s been laid bare in public more often than Pamela Anderson. A new bestseller, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks, blames him for ‘perhaps the worst war plan in American history’. For Rumsfeld’s critics, the book has had the foaming effect of Mentos placed in a bottle of Diet Coke.
But the cruellest cut came on August 3, during a rare Rumsfeldian visit to Congress. Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he endured a sound-bite tongue-lashing from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who asked, “Given your track-record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?” Rumsfeld winced, perhaps from Clinton’s lack of pentameter, but then could offer nothing poetic beyond, “My goodness.”
So we wonder: What’s happened to the Beltway Bard? Unpopularity? Thin skin? A tightened White House leash?
Or could it be age? On July 9, Rumsfeld turned 74, making him the oldest defence secretary in history. If he lasts until 2007, he will replace Robert McNamara — author of that earlier fiasco, Vietnam — as America’s longest-enduring Pentagon chief.
As Rumsfeld would say, that’s one long, hard slog. Then again, William Wordsworth wrote poetry until age 77. Robert Frost conjured a verse for incoming President Kennedy at 87. Ezra Pound was still ranting at 89. Surely Rumsfeld has a few couplets still inside, burning to get out.
But as the elections approach, don’t expect Rumsfeld to be calling bingo at GOP fundraisers. He faces lawsuits. He faces attacks. If Iraq doesn’t improve, he likely faces ever-harsher judgments. He may feel it’s a good time to lie low. —Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service
—Hart Seely is the author of ‘Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld’
