Well, guess what? Another outspoken proponent of family values has been caught having an affair. He's a Republican, of course, the governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford. (Everybody knows that Democrats don't give a hoot about family values.) Need I tell you that while a congressman during the Clinton administration, Sanford was extremely critical of the president's behavior in the Lewinsky affair? Need I also tell you that he said Clinton should resign his office once it was discovered what he had been doing?
This whole thing has a really bizarre aspect to it. For Sanford simply disappeared for a week, and nobody, including his family and staff knew where he was. Well where he was was in Argentina, poking his girlfriend. In the meantime, he misses Father's Day with his four sons, and the lieutenant governor of the state has not even been put officially in charge. A spokesman said the governor had gone hiking on the Appalachian Trail. His wife claimed she didn't know where he was. Are you kidding me?
Well, all of that turns out to be b.s. What actually happened was that Jenny Sanford had basically kicked the governor's butt out of the house two weeks ago "to maintain my dignity, self-respect and my basic sense of right and wrong."
Of course, there's been the usual apologies and expressions of regret. Sanford says he is resigning his post as head of the Republican governor's conference. How much do you want to bet he doesn't resign as governor of South Carolina?
4 comments:
I think you have enough time now to undertake a project detailing the fates of the conservatives who spoke of morality during the Clinton impeachment, but could not actually act moral when crunch time came...as come it must...to every man.
If I were not heavily engaged in a poetry project--I'm going to have someone publish a book of my verse since that is the only way it will ever see the light of day (it's not really bad, I'm told, by people with sound judgment in such matters)--it would doubtless be an engaging project.
No....kidding!
So that's what you've been occupied with.
I should do the same.
I have quite a few now from my poetry blog. I should take them out of the store room.
I have discovered that it is not a matter of being good or bad based on someone else's judgment; it is whether it appeals and resonates to another.
If someone's poetry resonated with me, I doubt that I would say that it's not bad. I would - in my imagination - do a Billy Elliott about it.
A poorly constructed poem may inspire, and suddenly its lack of refinement is seen to be "style"; and it is style.
Thus poetry evolves.
You are precisely right about the quality of poetry. Beauty, quality, and art are both in the eye of the beholder.
Poetry is an art form, and we certainly tolerate and understand the different styles in music and physical art of all kinds. There is many an unknown out there producing commendable stuff in all these realms who are never recognized.
However, all of these things are done within certain recognized parameters. I have loved poetry for a long time, but I just started writing it relatively recently. And I relied a good deal on the advice and criticism of friends who know about this stuff and on the poets who have written about their craft.
All of which is to say, I hesitated about taking this step for a good while. I don't want to be doing this just to stroke my ego. In fact, I've had a bias against self-publishing for all of my life. But given the economics of the matter now, I decided to take this step.
With poetry, in particular, there is an awful lot of awful drivel and shit out there, and I don't except that of the MFA-trained people (who, btw, constitute the mafia in control of the small and university presses who do publish poetry). If you need examples, just check out some of the horrible stuff you can find online.
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