06/17/10

From Percy Shelley, English Poet, c.1818

 

 

 

 

OZYMANDIAS

 

I met a traveller 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 lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

 


See what a classical education does for you? Instead of looking at that picture and thinking "asshole", I look at it and think "Ozymandias", and how all great accomplishments eventually end up as dust anyway. But in this case, "asshole" is probably more appropriate, because this guy has never accomplished anything.

He can read a hell of a speech off the teleprompter, he can strike that imperial pose like a real aristocrat, and he can "fool some of the people all the time". He refuses to prove that he graduated from any of the schools he claims to have attended. (He probably did with the help of affirmative action, but what is he hiding?)

If time-travel is ever developed, someone needs to go back and give Stanley Ann Dunham a lifetime supply of birth-control pills. America may survive through 2012, but it will never be the same again.