We’ve written at some length about Übersicherheitführer Steve Seyler‘s unfortunate penchant for poetry. Today, in honor of this, the most poetic of American holidays, we’re highlighting an email exchange from the archives between Seyler and “Good News Joe” Mariani, showing that Richard Dawkins’s notion that cultural practices spread like deadly infectious agents must be taken seriously by serious people.

For reasons that we can’t determine from the evidence at hand but in response to the unintelligible photo at left, Good News Joe sent Stevie the following billet-doux:

Steve works so hard
Whether he is near or far
I wish he could go to a lake
Or maybe a Vegas escape

Lack of metrical structure? Check. Unintentional partial rhymes? Check. Unthinking use of brain-dead advertising-slogan phraseology as if it were human language? Check. Complete and utter tin-ear-itude? Check, check, check. He’s learned well from his master, whose classic response may be seen after the break.

Joe tries and tries
To cobble words
Tries too hard me thinks
It’s with sadness that I say
His latest stanza stinks!

Each word is a precious gem
Beauty to behold
Please stop torturing them
As I don’t want to be a scold

So quit, stop
Find something else to do
A game, a trip
Hell, go to the zoo!

Yeah, for a poet, Steve’s a pretty good security guard… And at least he either knows how to use apostrophes correctly or at perhaps it’s just that the coin-toss came up right this time. We don’t really have much to add to this. It’s just another example of the utter weirdness that accompanies the conduct of business over at the BID. In the course of their social re-engineering of Hollywood they have to exchange bad poetry?! Before we met these folks we thought supervillains were somehow… more dignified?

We mean, sure, we oppose the handing-over of police powers to a bunch of creepy real-estate developers who abuse them in order to inflate the value of their holdings by socially cleansing Hollywood of the homeless and other untermenschen. We oppose it utterly, but at least we understand it; it makes economic sense in some horridly rational way. But the awful poetry? The horrid mocking? The weirdo preening antics? It’s David-Lynchian. It shouldn’t exist.

On that note, we’ll leave you with another poem, not by us, but by an anonymous spiritual compatriot of Steve and Joe:

Two men are joined as one in you:
One seems cold and hard,
One who achieves his goals.
Another is tender and kind,
He forgets not even the poorest.
He feels for the least of us.

Two streams owe their strength to you.
You are the sap rising from each root,
The seed that gives them birth —
A new spirit rose from you,
That forged us together as a nation
And dwells in us forever!

Image of red wall with writing is by Scott, is released under the CC BY 2.0, and is available from the photographer’s Flickr stream here.