Dave Wood

As I toiled through a battery of lit courses at Minnie Creek, also known as Eau Claire State College, I was constantly reminded by my profs that the stories and poems I was poring over meant something more than the flat letters on the page. Little did I know how prescient the profs were.

It took a perusal of the goings on in the helter-skelter of today’s government. To wit: When I read the opening lines of Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan,” little did I realize it presaged the obsessions on remodeling his residence, to wit, Coleridge wrote:

“In Xanadu did Kublai Khan/A stately pleasure Dome decree/ Where Alph the sacred river ran/Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea.’”

Compare this to a current event:

“In Washington/ Did Donald Trump/A fancy dance hall did decree/While a messed-up pool gushed colored slime/For all the world to see.”

You gotta give credit to the prescience of those writers of centuries ago. Like the wildman poet Percy Byssh Shelley who wrote of Ozymandias, a leader who once gloried in his power:

“I met a traveler 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, whose face and wrinkled lip sneer of cold command tell and that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless legs,/ And on the pedestal three words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty and despair.”

Years after reading that eerie passage, I turned on the news to see the waving locks of a recent leader, his substantial frame knelt over, as if in prayer, a newly poured concrete White House helipad ready to transport dancers to his “biggest ever” ballroom.

And then there’s Natalie Harp, a highly favored aid at his beck and call. Natalie doesn’t look much like the Mad Monk Rasputin, who gained the confidence of Tsarina Alexandra, who in turn had the ear of her hapless Tsar Nicholas II, who ended up dead with his entire family in a clammy Siberian basement and the Russian revolution proceeded as planned.

A troubling possibility. Also troubling is news about a modern American hero Doris Mason, a cook in the U.S. Navy during World War II who so distinguished himself in a naval battle that the Navy was scheduled to have a new aircraft carrier named after him. As this story goes to press, an executive order countered the deployment, explaining the President wanted the carrier named after himself, and the Negro galley cook could have his name attached to ‘‘a smaller vessel.”

“Make haste, make haste, my Merry men all/Our good ship sails the morn. “Oh say not so my master dear/ For I fear a deadly storm.”

Our Scots nobles were right loath to wet their cork-heeled shoes,/ But when the play were played/ their hats they swam above.

Half o’er, half o’er, to Aberdour/ It’s fifty fathom deep/ And there lies  good Sir Patrick Spens/ with the Scots lords at his feet.

I couldn’t help but see how this old Scots poem compares to the recent naval scandal. Here’s how mine goes:

Dimmerling is D.C. Aberdour is Aberdeen. The King is the President. Mason is the “best sailor.” And who is that guy at the “King’s right knee?”  My hunch is Stephen Miller, or possibly Pete Hegseth, (Nah, he’ll be back at a TV station before you can say Department of War). Obviously there’s a plenitude of choices in our gallery of suckups. Take your pick.