Poems

A Donald Serves The Nation

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I can’t help it!

I know the Donald doesn’t deserve any more attention, but he is SO beguiling!
The extreme look is Seussian, and his mission – absurd!
His self-congratulation as a reaction to being proven wrong could have been written up for one of the good Doctor’s bizarre clump-haired characters.

I’ve done what no one else could do!
I proved that One plus One is Two.
I forced the issue on this sum
By talking loud and playing dumb.

Whenever I was sternly told
“The answer’s ‘two’”, I’d glare and scold,
Then turn and ask them on the spot
“But what if? Just suppose it’s not!”

They’d give me something, then one more,
then count them both and like before
They’d say “That’s two, and it’s a fact.”
And that’s when I’d begin my act.

“I cannot see the thing you show!
It’s something I choose not to know.”
I’d stamp my feet and flip my hair
And claim their ‘two’ just wasn’t there.

I’d bluster some, then bloviate.
I’d act offended and irate.
They let me do it, as a famous,
celebrated ignoramus!

I spewed so much wild talk about it,
Some others soon began to doubt it!
“Suppose the answer’s cherry pie?”
“Could be!” I said! “If so, they lie!”

At last, alas the thing became
a rally built around my name.
And I became a great forsoother.
The “One Plus One Might Not Be Two-ther!”

That is, until they had to show
the documents that say it’s so.
And I received what was my due
Attention paid, by all of you.

I got my way through agitation
and supplied a grateful nation
proof at last, with wiles and art
That playing stupid can be smart.

When have you played dumb?

48 thoughts on “A Donald Serves The Nation”

  1. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    The Donald as a Dr. Suess character? Brilliant. One dimensional. Bizarre. Living within his own world between two covers. I never quite understood where he fit before. Now I’m trying to imagine his outfit–he needs no hat. It would cover his hair. But clown shoes. I think he owns them.

    I play dumb if I meet someone who wants to discuss an issue I do not want to touch. Then suddenly I know nothing about that issue! It seems the safest way out of that situation.

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    1. Jacque, I too would like to see a Seussified Donald, but I’m afraid I don’t have the artistic talent for it. If anyone has the talent and time to draw one, I’ll consider posting it. I can be reached at connelly.dale@gmail.com

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      1. I can give it a try, but it takes a while. Then there is my mother. Tomorrow I go get her to stay with me for a week while my sister-in-law, with whom she lives, has very major kidney surgery at Mayo today. Mom is like having a very placid tot around, but it will leave me little time for artistic expression. If we can reprise in it late June after gardening season…..

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  2. Wonderful poem, Dale!

    I’d bluster some, then bloviate.
    I’d act offended and irate.
    They let me do it, as a famous,
    celebrated ignoramus!

    But do you really think Trump’s idiocy is a stance? What a political genius he turns out to be . . . the only man smart enough to advance in politics by acting dumber than Sarah Palin! Who’da thunk it possible?

    I can remember playing dumb one time. My car at the time, a 1968 Mustang, had begun making miserable noises like a moose in end-stage labor, and I felt vibrations in the transmission that didn’t use to be there. I put an ad in the paper. Someone called and asked to test-drive the Mustang. I worried about that, but agreed; I wasn’t going to make the sale without a test drive. Since the death-throes noise came and went, I crossed my fingers and invited this fellow out.

    I might have told the whole truth if this fellow had not been so cocky. He was an expert who was about as humble as The Donald, and he found me amusingly stupid about cars. I decided to play a male version of the Dumb Blonde, smiling a lot and saying little. The Mustang did not fall apart on the test drive, and I made the sale.

    A week later, the phone rang. The car expert thought I might be interested to learn that the Mustang’s transmission had self-destructed just two days after the sale. The price to fix it was more than he’d paid for the car.

    “I’d feel bad about this, ordinarily,” he said with a condescending cackle, “but I could tell you don’t know anything about cars!”

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    1. I like to think the very best of 1968 Mustangs, and I think yours must have been very fond of you to behave in this very considerate way.

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      2. Filling out the real Estate disclosure statement is an interesting challenge to playing dumb. Remember that I just sold a house. I’m not saying . . .but I am saying . . .

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      1. Thanks! If that jerk had been only 2 percent less condescending, I would have been compelled by my Midwestern guilt to spill the beans. This guy, believe me, earned that terminally ill transmission.

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  3. Maybe I’m not playing.

    I think Donald’s costume should be a a sailor hat, a sailor jacket, no pants, and big flat feet. Wait. Wait. Which Donald is this?

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  4. Morning all. I didn’t watch the news at all yesterday, so didn’t realize that the bc had been released. However I have seen Donald “bloviating” (I LOVE that word) recently. Phew… glad that’s over.

    I hate to admit it, but I play the “dumb home/car owner” occasionally. I’ve found there are two responses to this stance, both of which are helpful in getting what I need. First there are the folks who think “Ah, she doesn’t know anything, so I can sell her more or get more from her.” Then there are the other folks who think “Poor baby. We’ve gotta help her.” Thankfully there are lots more of the latter than the former, at least in my life. This approach has also helped me hone a nice radar system for when someone is trying to put something over on me.

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  5. My 8-year-Old blonde grand-daughter can be very Blonde.
    She was recently playing hide-and-seek with her 6-year-old brother. It was her turn to seek, so she sat on the couch plunking at her Barbie guitar while she counted. Many many minutes later her parents heard her say “Oh, has anyone seen him?”
    When she founded her brother, he was all excited and kept bragging all day about what a good hider he was because she took so long to find him. She, and her parents, never said a word.

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  6. Good morning to all:

    I just don’t remember a major example where I played dumb, and if you believe that, I might have a car I want to sell to you. Okay, at least there are some small efforts at playing dumb that I can talk about. There are many times when I have said that something looks good when that might not be the truth.

    Then there are the things that I just can’t remember, but maybe if I really tried I could remember. Do you think I am really playing dumb? Maybe I’m just being diplomatic. Trump probably would make a great diplomat. In fact by playing dumb he has demonstrated that he would fit right in with many of our elected officials. However, to be a really good politican he needs act smart and hide the truth instead of playing dumb.

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  7. Does it count if you really were dumb, and then act like you were just playing dumb? I have a feeling I have done that more than once-specific instance is currently escaping me….

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  8. Truly brilliant, Dale. Laugh Out Loud brilliant…which I did all the way through reading it out loud.
    Did I hear right? is Donald now concerned about exposing Obama’s Harvard grades??
    Can it be true…surely I heard wrong.

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      2. I have memory that some of her grades at one of the colleges she attended were leaked to the press and her response was something along the lines of, “well, I passed didn’t I?…”

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  9. Isn’t it sad that people who are running for president don’t try to act smart? Just the opposite! Tim Pawlenty’s run for the office started with a decision to throw 50 points off his IQ, and then there is the matter of adopting a southern drawl (Google the story; it is fun). Apparently one qualification for being a good president is that you have to be dumber than the average Republican voter.

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    1. Makes me crazy that people have to act (or be) dumb to get elected. I don’t want someone who is an “average Joe” (or Jane), I want someone a whole lot smarter than me, thank you very much. Part of what I loved about “West Wing” was that President Bartlett never played dumb – he was a nerdy president, and he was more than happy to be nerdy and not hide his intelligence.

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      1. Some people want a president they would like to have a beer with. Me, I’m just happy to have a president I can hold up as an example to my child. (I get a lot of mileage out of his controversial Back-to-School speech, in which he described his mother getting him up before the crack of dawn so she could give him extra home schooling, so he could keep up with American kids while they were living in Indonesia)

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      2. There are times when the average Joe would actually be better than most of our politicans. I think most average Joes know that it really isn’t good for the government to keep bailing out the rich and giving them big tax breaks.

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      3. I agree that we need smart people in government. However, the average Joe isn’t in favor of some of the things the smart politicans do such as letting some very rich people do criminal things and then bail them out and give them tax breaks.

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      4. I am not a dinosaur. I did just find a way to do a double post. In the glossary a Jimmy is a dinosaur term because one is not supose to be able to make double posts due to some change in the way the blog operates.

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  11. I have played dumb from time to time when it would either keep me from saying something impolitic or rude (“really? the moon is made of green cheese? I did not know that. huh.”) or when I can learn something by keeping my mouth shut or only asking questions. I am not always good at it though. I will ‘fess up (though this will come as no revelation, I’m sure) that I’m better at being in the “smarty pants” role (and annoyingly so, I’m afraid) than playing dumb.

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    1. I agree, Anna, that being diplomatic and not completely truthful is sometimes a good thing. If someone is proud of something they did and askes you how it looks, that might not be a good time to tell them it doesn’t look good to you.

      I do think we need more truthfulness from politicans. Our government should not be hiding some things from us. Also, they shouldn’t act as if great damage has been done when things that they should have told us are leaked.

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      1. Agreed. Playing dumb about big things that affect peoples lives is not good and makes me cranky (e.g., the levees in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, the effects of the BP oil spill, Dick Cheney and all of his shenanigans – or, back in the 80s, the Reagan administration trying to push ketchup as “vegetable” for the purposes of child nutrition programs). I would include willful ignorance about these sorts of matters, not just “playing dumb,” as being just as bad.

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  12. I am no good playing dumb-I get too excited and I can hardly bear to not spill the beans. I love th image of a Seussified Donald. Just imagine what his hair and jowls would look like.

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  13. Morning–

    I’m sure there have been instances where I’ve met someone and — you know how sometimes you can tell right off the bat that you’re not going to like this person?– in those cases I think the quickest easiest way is just to nod and agree and dimiss them. Then I can get on with my day.

    Curious isn’t it how sometimes you can start off trying to keep up with someone and then realize ‘This person is an idiot’ and suddenly I’m backing off and shutting up.

    And that reminds me… saw something the other day; said to my wife ‘I feel a blog topic coming up on this’ but I’ll be darned if I can remember what that was. Darned ‘Mind like a steel sieve!’

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  14. This is only a little OT. People get their way at times by playing dumb. And then some people, some female people–including my wonderful daughter–get their way with men by crying. To be fair, I don’t think I know of an instance of this from the last seven or eight years of my daughter’s life, but it used to be her preferred way of dealing with men.

    That drove me nuts. I would show her how that was inimical to feminism. I would point out the loss of dignity. I would tell her this was a bad habit. I would tell her how many other ways she could get her way. She’d just deflect my opinions, and I knew she was thinking, “But it works!

    Once she poured a can of Pepsi on a brand new computer keyboard. That wasn’t a problem, for the computer had an extended care warranty. All she had to do was take the sticky one in and get a fresh replacement. On a long distance call, I talked her through the exchange, telling her just what she needed to say.

    “And, Molly, there is no need to turn on the waterworks. You have a contract. You don’t need to cry.”

    She went to the store and got the new keyboard.

    We had another call. “Congratulations. And now you know you don’t need to cry.”

    “Of course I cried. I was halfway into my story about the Pepsi can when the tears began to flow.”

    “Molly, dammit, you don’t NEED to cry.”

    “I’m sure you are right, Daddy. But, boy, you should have seen him RUN to get that new keyboard!”

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  15. I usually play dumb whenever I am in the presence of my nutty in-laws. I’m sure by now they have concluded that I must surely be “mildly retarded” but thats OK. It allows me to avoid mountains of trouble by NOT having to explain my politics and religion, and also hides the fact that I generally despise them for the chronically stupid choices they’ve made throughout their lives. We arrive at family functions, there is a nice but brief half hour discussion about the current weather conditions, we all eat a great big huge monstrous meal of a quantity only Lutherans can consume, then its off to the couch to lapse into a semi-dormant state while they revue their latest personal tragedies. Piece O cake! Duhhhh… What was the question?

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  16. A large part of my job can only be accomplished by playing dumb. Many people really expect it from me; they get really uncomfortable if they begin to realize that they are wrong in their assumptions. It is almost universally accepted that someone in my job class is too dumb to do anything else, therefore I must be dumb. Someone pointed out earlier today that you can’t use logic against belief – so true! I’ve learned that it makes everything much easier if I accept this and go along with it. That’s the part that has been challenging.

    It would be fun to do a cartoon with a Seussified Donald being FIRED!

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  19. Playing dumb can be smart, but I’m not sure I’m smart enough to spot the moment to play dumb. I’m just dumb enough to try to prove how smart I am.

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  20. Donald Trump is such a goon! Could we nickname him Red Rump Reference?

    I know it’s late, but this is when my mind’s at its sharpest.

    When I answer the door to a guy with a clipboard looking concernedly up at my roof who immediately starts yapping about how it would be in my best interest to consider having his company help me improve the integrity of my home by replacing the shingles and fascia with their superior materials at competitive prices, and then proceeds to ask in his authoritative way which phone number I can best be reached at, I shrug my shoulders and say, “I don’t own no phone.” If he’s smart, he leaves right then and there, but if he persists and says, “Well Ma’am, that’s no problem. When would be a good time for one of our representatives to stop back and show you a catalog of our fine products?”, that’s when I lose it and say, “If you aint off my step by the time I count to 3, I’m gonna pizzle rot your interwinkle!”
    Pretty dumb stunt, huh? (I mean the salesman, of course.)

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