Looks like having government officials who are Ignorant and Stupid is nothing new. Chinese poet Su Tung-Po nailed it centuries ago. 

I was browsing through the International Times for 1969 – the way one does. And there – amid the fevered, underground, counter-cultural world of macrobiotics, head shop ads, rock and roll, anarchy, activism, and psychedelia as seen from North Kensington – was this by the 11th-century Chinese poet Su Tung-Po.

This harsh judgment seems particularly apt considering the current crop of Cabinet officials in both Washington and Whitehall. Although to be truly on point one would have to add criminal and corrupt.

I don’t know when the poem was first translated into English but it certainly appeared in the January 1918 edition of Poetry, translated by Arthur Waley. 

Who was Su Tung-Po ?

Su Tung-Po (1037–1101) was a Chinese poet, writer, artist, and statesman during the Song era. He was born into a literary family in what is now Sichuan province. He is also known as Po Su Shi, Su Shih, and Su Dongpo.

Clearly a man of many talents he is credited with designing the parks around Lake Si in Hangzhou.

Su Tung-Po was a man of quite extraordinary ability with an astonishing career – a preeminent scholar and official of the Song dynasty which was a flourishing period for the arts in China. It seems there wasn’t any field in which he did not excel. 

Painting and calligraphy were required arts for scholar-officials in the civil service and he excelled in both. He rose in the ranks and impressed the emperors under whom he served. He was frequently at odds with powerful people at the court and was banished more than once. When he fell afoul of infighting and factionalism at the court he left the capital and took up positions in the provinces. 

At one point he was arrested and imprisoned for a year because – it is believed – his verses satirized the politics of the day. On his release he lived in exile in provincial Huangzhou, where he built a farm in the the foothills of what became known as the Eastern Slope.  He began to call himself Master of the Eastern Slope (Su Dongpo).