My father’s birthday is today. Some years ago, Grace Paley wrote a poem describing what her father was like when he was the same age as my father is now. I discovered that by changing a few words, and adding a few words, the poem applies pretty well to my own father (at least, before January 20 of this year):<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My father said
\n how will they get out of it
\n they should be sorry they got in<\/p>\n
My father says
\n how will they get out
\n Cheney Bush the whole bunch
\n they don’t know how<\/p>\n
goddammit he says
\n I’d give anything to see it
\n they went in over their heads<\/p>\n
he says
\n greed greed time
\n nothing is happening fast enough<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What are the changed words, you ask? I’ll let you look up the poem yourself, in Paley’s book Leaning Forward<\/em> (Penobscot, Maine: Granite Press, 1985), p. 69. Hint: Paley’s poem was written c. 1970; the political leaders of that time were more aware of their errors in judgment than are Cheney and Bush.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My father’s birthday is today. Some years ago, Grace Paley wrote a poem describing what her father was like when he was the same age as my father is now. I discovered that by changing a few words, and adding a few words, the poem applies pretty well to my own father (at least, before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[537],"class_list":["post-2434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberal-religion","tag-grace-paley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2434"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7375,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434\/revisions\/7375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}