flickering pictures

As plucked from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and promptly googled:

“I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

That’s e.e. cummings on Warren G. Harding, America’s 29th president. One look at cummings’s picture and you get the feeling there were plenty more scathing tongue-lashings where that came from. He also seems like the kind of guy who could get away with not capitalizing his name, looking like Humphrey Bogart and using words like “dipsomaniacal” (which incidentally means “alcoholic”).

Photo via Wikipedia.

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