I met Max at the San Diego Auto Show this afternoon, and he got me thinking about how inefficient and ineffective and inadequate some people can be for the jobs they are supposed to do. Max stands near the entrance to the cavernous San Diego Convention Center and greets visitors to the auto show. He is perfect for the job. He is articulate, has an obviously big brain, and given the appropriate information, makes accurate and fair decisions. He is a decider.

San Diego being the perfect place to work (or not), I doubt that Max would be interested in a job in Washington; but it occurred to me that he would be a perfect stand-in for the big decider in the White House.

Max got me thinking about a poem by E. E. Cummings that I’ve always liked. I know enough about Cummings, who died in 1962, to know he wouldn’t mind my using his poem in this blog.


pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born--pity poor flesh
and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if--listen:there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go

e.e. cummings