Poetry Licks Ass

April is National Poetry Month.  Yes, you read that right.  Since it is the end of April now, I guess this post is a little late.  But who cares, because poetry sucks fucking ass.

Really, poetry bites. 

I don’t know why poetry sucks so bad.  I mean, I like music, and music is pretty much poetry that somebody sings.  So why is it that, when somebody doesn’t sing poetry, it sucks so much? 

Years ago, poetry was so popular in America that poets you have never even heard of got incredibly rich.  Like Walt Mason, known as “Uncle Walt,” of Emporia, Kansas, was one of the richest writers in the world around World War I.  He wrote poetry for newspapers.  And James Whitcomb Riley of Greenfield, Indiana, who was also one of the wealthiest writers of his time.  Get this: he made most of his money by reciting his poetry in theatres and halls for the cost of admission.  Can you fucking believe it?  What the fuck was wrong with people in those days?

Yet, why did I pay ten bucks for this?

He drinks a whisky drink.
He drinks a vodka drink.
He drinks a lager drink.
He drinks a cider drink.
He sings the songs that remind him of the good times.
He sings the songs that remind him of the better times.
Don’t cry for me next door neighbor….
  — Chumbawumba from Tubthumping

See.  If you just read that without the music, it sucks ass.

I try to be a creative kind of dude.  I write, I draw, I invent new menstrual devices.  But I have never been into poetry.  It takes a lot for me to like a poem.

For instance, here is one of my favorite poems.

This poem only works for me if I imagine that, after he wrote this poem, William H. Mearns was found murdered under mysterious circumstances.

Since poetry eats shit, it is hard for me to get into it.  But I have tried for a few weeks to come up with a good poem, because it is National Poetry Month.  Here is the best I could do.

That’s all I’ve got for you after weeks of trying.

See what I mean?  Poetry is total fucking smegma.

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Stoopid Is As Stoopid Does

Are you stoopid?  I ask because, according to some, a whole lot of you are, indeed, stoopid.  Like, maybe most of us would have done about as badly as Kellie Pickler (of American Idol fifteen minutes) does here when asked a third-grade geography question on the show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader.  I think I would have gotten this particular question right, but that certainly does not prove that I’m smart.  Why the fuck do I even know what country has Budapest as its capital?  Why the fuck do I need to know that?  Why is it important at all to know what the capitals of any countries or states are?  Why are we teaching third-graders this crap?  They will just forget it like the rest of us.  They will forget it because they have absolutely no need to remember it.  We could instead be teaching children valuable lessons they will use for the rest of their lives, like how to mow the lawn.  It’s not going to mow itself, you know.  How about we teach third-graders how to make a decent batch of cookies?  I want some cookies and I don’t feel like making them myself, and I don’t want any of those hard, crumbly cookies I can buy at the store.  I want fresh cookies.  Now, third grader!

What has remembering anything at all got to do with being smart or stoopid?  I guess am so stoopid that I don’t even know what stoopid means. 

According to a National Geographic survey, most young adults in America don’t know shit about geography.  They can’t locate anything on a map.  About eleven percent can’t even locate the United States on a map.  Well, National Geographic, have you noticed that most maps have words on them indicating where particular places are?  Do you think that maybe there is a reason for that?

So, a lot of Americans don’t know where they are in the world.  Why is this a big deal?  Is the fear that one day one of those people will be piloting a spaceship in outer space, just floating around, and he will need to get home without a GPS or anything else to show him where the US is?  He won’t even have one of those crazy maps that has the names of places in big letters over each place, so he will be stuck in outer space forever.  Big fucking deal.  If that happens, too fucking bad for that dude.  Boo fucking hoo.  Let him float out there.  He should at least have brought a goddamn map with him.  Or, how about this?  He can just land any-fucking-where.  As long as he doesn’t land in the water, he can probably get home no matter where he lands his goddamn spaceship.  He can stop in, let’s say, Sweden, where people apparently know a whole lot of geography according to the survey, and ask someone, “Do you know where the United States is?”  Hopefully, Swedish people also know English since they are so fucking cosmopolitan, and they would say, “Ja!” 

I used to know a girl who was a Geography major in college.  Let’s call her Sabrina.  And, yes, you read that right: she was a Geography major.  In college.  I guess she intended to go into one of the Big Five geography firms after she graduated.  Anyway, Sabrina was from Canada and she knew a whole fucking lot about places.  If you put one of those maps without the names of places in front of her, she could find anywhere.  And Sabrina knew the capital of every goddamn place.  I knew Sabrina because, at a very young age, she married a friend of mine here in the United States.  She met him over the internet and, one day, drove down from Canada and married him.  She probably didn’t use any maps the whole way down.  After they were married for a couple of years, Sabrina ran off to the Midwest to live with the brother of a has-been movie star.  No kidding.  She just picked up and left my friend one day, and headed for the Midwest United States.  I think she had met the brother of a has-been movie star over the internet, too.  Then she dropped the brother of the has-been movie star and, after that, I lost track of Sabrina.  I don’t know what the fuck Sabrina is up to today or where she is.  But she does.  Sabrina knows exactly where she is.

But you know what?  I do not want Sabrina piloting my goddamn spaceship anyway.  Even with a bunch of maps with words on them and GPS and other navigational devices, I do not want Sabrina piloting my spaceship.  I would rather just take my chances that I can land somewhere and find some Swede who speaks enough English to tell me where the United States is.

Like I said, Swedish people seem to know a lot about geography.  If you are American, when you are floating around in space without a clue about where to land your spaceship, maybe you can ask some Swedish dude who floats by in one of the spaceships that is part of Sweden’s massive space program.  Uh huh.  You count on that Swedish flagship passing by.

As far as I can see from the survey, the likelihood that people in your particular country know a whole lot about geography is directly related to just how lame your country is.  Sure people in Sweden know where they are.  They probably cry about it every day.  “Shit!  I’m still in Sweden!  Might as well yodel while I stare at the map some more.”

The only people who did worse than the Americans in the survey were the Mexicans.  But I think the Mexicans were lying.  When they got a call from National Geographic they didn’t know it wasn’t a call from the US Immigration and Naturalization Service.  So, yeah, they were like, “No, I don’t know where the United States is!  I have no fucking idea!  I don’t know where anything is!  Hey, where the fuck am I?  Oops, forgot my name.  No, my bags are not packed.”  All I know is that, when the time is right, Mexicans do not seem to have any more trouble finding the United States than the Swedes.

There was another survey that was supposed to show how stoopid Americans are.  That study was done by a group called Common Core.  It asked a bunch of questions about history and literature, with a question about Plato and Aristotle thrown in there just to make you sweat.  If you want take the test yourself, you can download the quiz here.

This test was given to seventeen-year-olds, and the results demonstrate that seventeen-year-old Americans don’t know a whole lot of the history and literature they were asked about.  About one in ten thought that Hitler was a munitions manufacturer between the world wars.  Big deal.  Everyone knows he was a big prick with a little moustache.  Everybody knows that, if you want for people to think you’re a prick, wear a moustache like his.  Hitler is dead but his fashion legacy lives on: you will never see anyone with a stoopid little moustache like his again.  The correct choice on that question was, “Adolf Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany during the Second World War.”  I bet it’s the “Chancellor of Germany” part that tripped up the seventeen-year-olds.  If the correct choice had been, “Hitler was a big prick who was dictator of Germany during the Second World War and had a nasty-assed little moustache that nobody has worn since,” you can bet that our nation’s youth would have done a lot better.

All the other questions are just like that.  Yeah, 26% of seventeen-year-olds thought that Christopher Columbus sailed after 1750.  So?  Big fucking deal.  Here is what you need to know about Christopher Columbus: when he got to America, he did not know where the fuck he was in the world.  He could not have identified the United States on a map that did not have “United States” written in big letters across it because, even though he was in North America, he had no fucking idea where he was.  If Christopher Columbus had been in a spaceship, he would still be floating around in space watching porn and eating cake, and Sabrina would have ditched you in your spaceship to go to Chris’s.  If it matters to you whether you would be floating around aimlessly in 1492 or 1792, you deserve to be floating in space with Christopher Fucking Columbus.

I could go through all the questions, but I won’t because it is boring.  The whole report is boring.  The quiz is boring.  The information is useless.  I bet that everybody at Common Core could score an A on that quiz.  Whoopty fucking doo.  Now that they have aced the history and literature that they chose, maybe they can figure out how to design a decent website without text so small you need a magnifying glass to read it, except for that one sentence on the front page that is in type so fucking huge that Chris Columbus can see it from the window of his spaceship.  Maybe in between coming up with tests designed to stump American seventeen-year-olds, they could pop over to MySpace or Blogger and see that seventeen-year-olds kick their asses at designing web pages.  Oh, knowing about Geoffrey Chaucer, with his “Knyghtes Tale” and his “Hoost to the compaignye,” is so much more relevant to modern life than knowing how to put together a proper goddamn website, right?

I read Chaucer in college in its original Middle English.  Today, I have no goddamn clue what “the Freres Tale” or any other one of the stories was about.  If I knew a seventeen-year-old who read that shit, I would kick his ass.  What kind of whacked-out freak are you?  How much time do you spend reading Tolkien and playing D&D?  You are just about to shoot up your fucking high school, aren’t you?  Can you please help me design my website and whip me up some fucking cookies?

If you ask me, memorizing useless shit like the capitals of things and what year particular events occurred is pretty fucking stoopid.  How smart would it be for you to memorize all that geography crap based on the snowball’s-chance-in-hell theory that maybe someday you will be stuck in a spaceship without any navigational equipment?  That’s like you memorizing every organ in the body because, you never know, you just might have to sew together a human being from scratch someday.  Hey, maybe you had better just memorize everything about everything because tomorrow you could be God. 

Hey, you elitist cocksuckers at Common Core and National Geographic, how come I never see headlines telling me about how some guy is alive today only because he knew where Japan was on a map without any places named on it?  And how come I never hear about how the next generation of hybrid cars was inspired by The Federalist Papers?

Maybe I am stoopid, but if I am ever out hanging with my friends and one of them tells me that he was able to solve any problem — any problem in his personal or professional life at all — by remembering Chaucer, I will have his ass committed in a heartbeat. 

And don’t accuse me of being anti-intellectual.  I am not saying you shouldn’t read Chaucer or you shouldn’t read The Federalist Papers or you shouldn’t stare at maps and yodel for hours on end.  Be my guest.  Just don’t expect for me to do it and think that it’s what makes me an intellectual.  If I’m smart at all, it’s because I don’t allow a bunch of assholes to tell me what to read or what I need to know.

Oh, also, those assholes are just wrong about kids: see this article and this article.  Kids today are doing better than they have ever been.  Maybe the assholes at Common Core have their hearts are in the right place, but I wouldn’t know.  How the fuck am I supposed to know where a goddamn heart is supposed to be?

One other thing: it’s the Swiss who yodel.  Not the Swedish.  Whatever.

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