Free Republic

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bull$hit. An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could...

by Chris Georg The Yugoslav-born poet Charles Simic has been announced by the Library of Congress to be the new United States’ poet laureate. This way the present co-Poetry Editor of “The Paris Review” will become the 15th Poet Laureate of the United States. He will replace Donald Hall in the Poet Laureate program that promotes poetry across the nation. Charles Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade and he emigrated along with his family in the United States in 1953. He learned English and he later graduated from the same high school that Ernest Hemingway had attended, Oak Park...

CONCORD, N.H. — Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic, who learned English as a teenage immigrant, will be the new U.S. poet laureate, the Library of Congress announced Thursday. Simic, who lives in Strafford, will replace another New Hampshire poet, Donald Hall of Wilmot, the poet laureate program, which promotes poetry across the nation. "I'm overwhelmed," he said. Simic taught at the University of New Hampshire for 34 years before moving to emeritus status. He won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1990 for his book of prose poems, "The World Doesn't End." He also is an essayist, translator, editor and...