I think it’s great that Tom Ridge is resigning as chief of the keystone cops. Hope he takes his absurd color chart with him. He has been one of Bush’s flying monkeys of fear, a key cog in the gears grinding up civil liberties. If I never again see him on my TV, calling for general disarray and national panic, it’ll be too soon.

They’re coming to get us! We don’t know where or when or how, and we can’t face up to why, but everybody calmly go about your consumerism in a state of heightened vigilance to this nonspecific, probably imminent threat. Orange! Orange! … What an asshat. So I’m glad he’s decided it’s time to go write his book.

The only problem with all these miscreant minions scuttering out the back doors of power is that All Hat and No Cattle gets to appoint people who are even worse for us. One of the guys up for Ridge’s job was responsible for setting up the Iraqi police. … The first police force in the history of the planet to see 3200 terrified sworn officers desert their posts in a single day. Is it possible Bush could find someone as bad to replace Ridge as he did to replace Ashcroft? There can’t be torture in Gitmo, because the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply. These guys are irregulars, no uniforms. Therefore we aren’t bound to honor the Geneva Convention. This all just keeps getting worse and worse. Anyway, in honor of Ridge’s Orange Terror Alerts, here’s a poem:

Why I am Not a Painter

by Frank O’Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in

“Sit down and have a drink” he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. “You have SARDINES in it.”

“Yes, it needed something there.”

“Oh.” I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”

All that’s left is just

letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color; orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven’t mentioned

orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery

I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.