I was thinking just yesterday (Monday my time) that we were finally saying good-bye to the dumbest president in history and were now getting ready to inaugurate one of the most intelligent and best educated. Given the mess we are in after the last 8 years (though the deregulation of the financial industry started under Clinton, giving credit where credit is due), I just hope that brains, youth, enthusiasm and the ability to inspire will be enough. We didn't fall this far overnight and it is going to take us some time, a lot of effort and more than a little sacrifice to dig ourselves out of the mess the US finds itself in right now. One caveat about the inaugural event: that thing that was announced as a "poem" and was read after the inauguration address was the worst doggerel I have heard in ages. It was wooden, had no movement, no shape, no form, no message, no music and darn tootin' little poetry. It was so bad, I had to leave the room after the first 8 or 9 lines, though I could still hear the thing droning on from the other room. I hope it was written by a school child and not by someone who claims to be a poet by profession. I sure hope no one won a contest to have the privilege to inflict this nonsense on the world in the name of poetry. Heaven deliver us from this variety of "poetry"!

More info on the idiotic poem read at the inauguration: it was written by a prof at Yale (one assumes a prof of creative writing). She, and her poem, make a very strong argument why academia is no place for artists. Turn the scholars loose on the works of artists (someone with a Ph.D. in the liberal arts needs something to analyze, after all), just don't think you're going to be turning out Ivy League poets at Ivy League universities (or any university, for that matter). I have only one question: who was responsible for selecting this individual and asking her to write a poem for the inauguration? There are at least 100 school children who could have done better, and who knows how many others who would have been up to the task (and sure could have used the recognition of their work). The poet they did choose wrote a poem lacking in inspiration and artistic merit, and she makes close to a 6 figure salary teaching at Yale. What's wrong with America? Exhibit One!