Puting It To Putin. Not.

This post will be a tad shorter than usual -- the world is, in Wordsworthian terms, way too much with me. So let's get to it.

Readers may recall that from time to time I use poetry to highlight and illuminate a given situation or person. The last example I believe was using Auden's The Average to get at the essence of Ontario's former Premier, Dalton McGuinty. The key lines were, "The silence roared displeasure / He saw the shadow of an average man attempting the exceptional / And ran."

Still on the run, as I believe.

Now we come to Vladimir Putin and the situation in the Crimea. The poem that in my opinion best encapsulates this situation in Maurice Ogden's The Hangman. It is somewhat lengthy, but I recommend Googling the piece -- it sums up the Crimean takeover brilliantly. The line that most nails the issue under discussion is the following: "I did no more than you let me do."

Food for thought. Now I must off; something about a lost airplane. But there was another who commented (sort of) on the latest example of Russian irredentism, and here I turn to the singer Julie London, and her signature song  "Crimea River."

And sometimes that's all one can do.