"Look On My Works, ye Mighty, And Despair!"

The weather's getting cold, the United States of America is collapsing, and my unemployment is almost gone. Men of less stern stuff might get down. But not me. I always keep an eye on the big picture. I also have a quaint hobby that takes my mind off the dreary realities of contemporary life: poetry. I woke up this morning with a cheerful little ditty by Percy Shelley in my head, Ozymandias. Bear with me, it's not long.

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.

What? You don't find that an uplifting poem? I do, and here's why. Some day that statue is going to be a statue of George W. Bush outside what a thousand years before was the Kennebunkeport Yacht Club. It will be covered with pigeon shit and bums will piss all over it. The ludicrous civilization that elevated such mediocrities to high eminence will be dust and long forgotten. In a weird sort of way, that thought always cheers me up.