I published this on Google Plus some time ago, but I thought I should also post it here. The current ascendency of the egregious Newt Gingrich, now supposedly the front-runner for the Republican nomination, brings me back to the time when he was Speaker of the House. At the time I was making heavy use of an anagram-generating program, and it turned out that there were better anagrams for “Newton Leroy Gingrich” (his full legal name) than for nearly any other name or phrase I tried out. This inspired me to write a poem, founded in the Oulipo-style rule that every line had to be an anagram of Newt’s full name:
We’re crooning nightly,
Renewing thorny logic,
Cheerily noting wrong.
Coiling energy, thrown.
Wrongly enticing hero,
Ongoing wintry lecher,
Reigning theory clown,
Whining electron orgy
Growing incoherently.
Ha! Pretty much sums him up.
Coolio…nice job. i liked “reigning theory crown/whining electron orgy”
Is that meant to be “growling incoherently” on the final line? If so, it’s still a rather accurate characterization of him.
Oh wait–now I see that there’s only one “l” in the full name–so it can’t be “growling”. But I guess he’s “growing incoherently” too, when you think about his poll numbers.
This would seem to be heroic in the Foucauldian sense.
If I ever form a punk band, I will definitely call it “Whining Electron Orgy.”
Incidentally, I have to take this opportunity to remind everyone of perhaps the greatest Gingrich quotation of all time: “I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” Thorny logic, indeed.