That title sums up a cultural event in 1961. The aging Robert Frost was asked by incoming President John Kennedy to read a poem at his inauguration. He promptly drafted a new piece just for the event. The wind and the sunlight prevented his seeing the text, so instead he recited an old favorite from memory. That was fortunate, because frankly the new one, “Dedication”, was not among his best. It began

Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state
Seems something artists ought to celebrate.

The thing didn’t improve much after that. The one he substituted was one of his classics about pre-industrial America, “The Gift Outright”, with its famous beginning

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

You can go see the full text of both poems HERE.

I mention this because I was asked to write a poem for yesterday’s reinauguration of Our Noble Lame Duck. The powers that be wanted to make it up to me for rejecting my proposed draft of the Inaugural Address, which they thought was too “divisive”. It had begun:

Friends, foes, and fence-sitters:
We won; they lost; now we get to rub their faces in it.

I figured that updating Frost’s old work to modern times, and to **ahem** my own advocacy of creative corporatism, would be better than drafting doggerel for the day, so I unashamedly plagiarized it. Remember the words of Picasso:

“Mediocre artists borrow; great artists steal.”

Obviously, my other inspiration was that immortal passage from Also sprach Zarathustra:

“Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Was habt ihr gethan, ihn zu überwinden?”

For some strange reason, this effort too was rejected by some staffer, who claimed it might remind people of Enron, or even Halliburton. I think that plebian was just tone deaf to good verse. Here’s what you should have heard me read at yesterday’s ceremonies:

The Omega Merger

We owned the firms before they owned us all.
They were our tools almost a century
Before we chose to be theirs. Charters once
All came from Kings abroad, or States at home,
Restricting range, and proscribing free acts,
Protecting cash investors had put in
By banning suits to seize stockholder funds.
The personhood we withheld kept them weak,
Until courts ruled that they were just like us,
Yet not condemned to crumble into dust,
Thus shares of immortality were ours.
Thereafter we transformed ourselves from men
(Whose mortal conscience was our tragic flaw)
To willing cells within a greater whole,
Transcending human age and death and torts,
And qualms at any route to profits dear.