The news that Tony Blair is the UK candidate for the position of EU president is a revolting development. Blair single-handedly made Labour both electable and unacceptable, spinning a rotten coalition of Guardian and Telegraph readers, that tried to fuse a social justice agenda with Tory takes on war, justice, banking, and privatisation of various sectors of society - in the process making Labour the most draconian, war-mongering, and pro-business government the UK has seen since, or before, Thatcher. Blair's cringe-worthy lies on weapons of mass destruction and dalliance with Bush-Cheney (themselves now staring at a smoking gun back at Langley that makes the Bourne movies plausibly undeniable) make him the least-likely convert to Catholicism since Symons. He is a dreadful politician and a duplicitous weirdo who grimaces artifice. He must not be allowed to run and ruin the EU.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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As for the reference to Thatcher, I think New Labour has taken free-market doctrine to heights Thatcher could only have dreamed about.