Apr '03 [Home]

Rummy Poetry

The Opaque Tropes of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

. . .

The Hamburg Abendblatt recently asked, Was weiss Herr Rumsfeld von Dante?
Hart Seely of Slate has recorded these (found?) poems and more (4/2 issue):



The Unknown


As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2003, Department of Defense news briefing


~ .

Happenings


You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.

It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing