ON ACCUSATIONS THAT
PELOSI AND OTHERS
WERE BRIEFED ON BUSH
ADMINISTRATION TORTURE
When evil deeds catch up with you,
Your best defense is “You’re one, too”
–Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet, from the Nation (6/8/09)
Calvin Trillin
Calvin Trillin: On the Pelosi accusations
Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet
From the March 16th edition of the Nation comes Calvin Trillin, summing things up in four lines.
Pundits Say Washington Must Instill Confidence
The pundits say Obama must discuss
Our plight but sound much less like Gloomy Gus:
We need the only thing-we-have-to-fear leaders,
Or, failing that, the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.
Calvin Trillin: a deadline poem
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker writer and Deadline Poet for the Nation, has always been a good friend of the Guardian and the alternative press.
At our founding convention of the alternative press in l978 in Seattle, Trillin popped up to do a story for the New Yorker.
Since we had no dinner speaker, we asked Trillin to drop his reporter stance long enough to give the keynote speech at our final dinner. He did and it was a good one. HIs piece in the New Yorker was one of the most best and most prescient stories ever done on the alternative press. It drew heavily on his experience on the campus daily at Yale University, where he went to college, and on his knowledge of Henry Luce of Time magazine fame, who had been an earlier graduate of the Yale campus daily. In short, Trillin got the point of the alternative press as an important business model as well as a journalistic model and wrote it up beautifully in New Yorker style. It’s time he returned to the alternative press and updated his piece.
Meanwhile, he has developed a most enjoyable persona in the Nation magazine: “Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet.” He turns out a splendid timely poem for each issue, on deadline. Here’s his latest in the current Feb. 23 edition of the Nation:
INCENTIVES
The Wall Street ways are mighty funny:
A bonus comes for losing money.
About this rule they’re quite devout
No wonder they need bailing out.
“We had fun,” W sums up W
By Bruce B. Brugmann
And so George W. Bush, after two wars, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the Israeli mess, and a deepening recession, after trashing the New Deal, the middle class, the poor, the environment, education, and the constitution for eight years, summed up his presidency at his final press conference.
“We had fun,” he said.
The rest of us inside and outside the U.S. didn’t have much fun during the Bush years. Bush ended up with a 22 per cent approval rating. Obama comes in with an 80 per cent approval rating.
Calvin Trillin, deadine poet, made the point eloquently in an epitaph for Bush in the Jan. 26 edition of The Nation. It was titled “The Way People Feel About the End of the Bush Administration And the Future of George W. Bush.”
Trillin buried Bush in two lines:
“So when he leaves we won’t be keeping track of him.
We’re just relieved as hell to see the back of him.”
Bush ended up with a 22 per cent approval rating. Obama comes in with an 80 per cent approval rating. The way people feel about Obama and the beginning of the Obama administration is one of the most dramatic and exciting things to happen in the history of the United States of America. The dreams of our founding fathers, and the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr., are being realized in Washington, D.C., in a massive, historic three day Inauguration celebration and flashed round the country and the world.
Let us savor the moment. And then let us get to work and keep the pressure on to see that Obama and his administration continue working to realize the dreams. The process will never end.
McCain’s speech gets an Ammianoliner
Yesterday’s Ammianoliner:
McCain’s speech runs the gamut of emotion from A to B.
(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup.Tom Ammiano on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2008, the day after the acceptance speech of Sen. John McCain at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.)
Good going, Tom. You enunciated much better. Editorial aside: Tom was in the office on Friday for an editorial interview on the November election. Instead of being a standup comedian who happens to be a politician, he becomes a sitdown comedian who happens to be a politician. He complained wryly that, because his jokes were appearing regularly on the Bruce blog, that he was under a lot of pressure. Under pressure, he explained, to not only come up with pithy, topical jokes but to do it daily and and to enunciate clearly. We assured him that it was well worth the effort because he was getting his Ammianoliners out on deadline, getting enormous international viewship on the almost famous Bruce blog, and doing it all from the comfort of his Bernal Heights home. Moreover, it would be good training for his move next year to Sacramento as a San Francisco assemblyman.
While the Nation magazine has Calvin Trillin as its Deadline Poet, we have Tom Ammiano as our
Deadline Ammianoliner. B3