What rhymes with Bush?

In spite of my best efforts, I’m not the sort of person who would just willingly sit down with a volume of poetry. Nor am I one to spend precocious reading time with any political diatribes masquerading as rational thought. So why exactly did I pick up Calvin Trillin’s new volume A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme? Well, in part due to Trillin’s recent appearance on The Daily Show and previous familiarity with some of Trillin’s essays, but mostly in an attempt to feebly laugh at what has become a scary situation.

As poetry, Trillin is more Ogden Nash than Byron, but his limerick-style is suited to the nonsensical subject matter. Redundant sounds and forced rhythms make A Heckuva Job downright annoying to read straight through, but Trillin isn’t interested so much in proper placement of stresses as he is in driving home his political barbs. This he does with a wry tone, covering the misadventures of Iraq , the war on terror, and the sluggish Katrina response. A stanza from The War in Nine Stanzas is indicative:

Though nothing showed Iraq had played a part,
That’s where some hawks thought vengeance ought to start.
(Then terrorists could count on what we’d do:
Attack us, we’ll strike back, though not at you.)
We toppled first that band of Afghan loonies
Who’d let bin Laden hide out in their boonies.
The Taliban were smashed in one fell swoop.
Bin Laden, though, had plainly flown the coop.
Bush then forgot that name, and said, “In fact,
Iraq’s the place that has to be attacked.”
The war, Rove thought, with this one course correction,
Could still endure until the next election.
(August 15, 2004)

The types and subjects of the attacks are nothing new, and over the course of the volume, Trillin tends to repeat himself. As any good roast needs to be, though, each poem in A Heckuva Job contains enough truth to hit home. In the case of Dubya's policies, that might mean more of an occassion to cry, but at least Trillin's poesies add a little bit of comic relief.