The poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld

What follows is another poem from D.H. Rumsfeld. As Hart Seely noted on Slate.com, our Secretary of Defense has a knack for “jazzy, impromptu riffs,” and as I was listening to his press briefing today, I heard the gem below. Let me be clear: this is exactly how he said it. I only broke this riff into verse; otherwise, this is just one answer to a question.

bq. *Tipping Points*

bq. No, I can’t say we’re at a tipping point.
I think that there won’t be a single point.
I think a tipping point involves a single human being
that makes a conscious judgment that,
“The guy’s going to be gone,
that regime’s going to be over,
and I want to be a part of something new and fresh
going forward and not a part of that.”

bq. And it may happen to an individual,
it may happen to a cluster of individuals,
it may happen to an army unit,
it may happen to a village — the bulk of a village.

bq. It’s unlikely to happen,
you know,
instantaneously across a country,
because the facts on the ground are so different
in different parts
of that country today that I think it would be unlikely.

bq. I do think the concept of a tipping point is correct,
and at some point,
the aggregation of all of those individual tipping points
having been reached,
it will be in effect the country will have tipped.
But it will be cumulative rather than at one moment.