WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF KARL ROVE: What Little Children Have To Say About the News

This is a collection of various comments by 6, 7, and 8 year olds with regard to giving them only Karl Rove’s name and his title. I work from time to time in schools as an Artist in Residence for the State. I tell the children ‘a mystery,’ in this case the very long title belonging to Mr. Rove. Then each child writes or speaks, wrestling with what all the words mean together and separately. Sometimes I use a news headline of the day, and an image, idea or brief news-story or a song. Sometimes I help straighten out a bit of syntax, and clarify the ‘invented’ spelling, but not much more.

When I tried to explain to the children about the recent story about Sheryl Crow and Mr. Rove, et al, re a conversation about global warming at the White House Correspondents Dinner… several of the children heard Sheryl Crow’s name as “Share-a-Crow,â€? and fell down on top of each other laughing…. The children are innocent, and just love the sounds of words, and the images words make in their minds. So, we just kept it to Mr. Rove’s name and title and a full-color picture of Mr. Rove standing in a light wind and in full sunlight, hence:

THE WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF, KARL ROVE

He lives in a white house?
Isn’t that where they keep all the hamburgers?

No, that’s White Castle, the hamburger fast food place.

I think ‘White Castle Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove,’ sounds better.

This Rove man is only a deputy…
that means there must be a real sheriff somewhere,

Maybe the sheriff is with Dead-I’d Dick.

Who is that?

I don’t know, nobody knows, he’s like Waldo.

If this man is really a chief, then where are his feathers?

I think they are near his ears: see he has white duck down
on his head; it looks nice and soft like the feathers that come out
of our sofa if you sit down real fast like nobody’s supposed to.

I never saw a man before with a big forehead
that reaches all the way to his collar in back.

Sometimes God makes more face than he needs and
puts the eyes and mouth only right in the middle
with a lot of skin left over at both ends.

People with yellow teeth should never wear a yellow necktie,
because then its looks like you are trying to match on purpose.

A staff? like in the nativity with St. Joseph and the donkeys and the sheep?

What if his real name was ‘Red-rover Red-rover Run-us-all-over’?

I don’t like that game, it hurts everybody’s arms.

He reminds me of the shiny head guy
where you rub his big belly at the Chinese restaurant
and he gives you good luck.

My grandmother says
you make your own luck.

Well, my grandmother says sometimes you can buy luck,
there’s the lottery
but you have to pay a lot to get that kind of luck

Yeah, we could all go bang-kruppt.

Yeah, bang-curupt.

Yeah, bank-corupt.

And run out of luck anyway.

Yeah.

Then we’d have to start all over.

Yeah, start over. Good idea.
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(…The ‘deputy / sheriff’ reference “is likely from a lyric, “I shot the Sheriff, but I did not shoot the Deputy.â€? At this age, across the board, the kidlettes seem to be filled with the music their parents listen to. Note: “I Shot the Sheriff” is a reggae tune written and performed by Bob Marley and the Wailers. H/t S. Mullen. )
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“WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF KARL ROVE: What Little Children Have To Say About the News,â€? © 2007, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved, is printed here under Creative Commons License by which author grants permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular work under the conditions that the use be non-commercial, that the work be used in its entirety and not altered, added to, or subtracted from, and that it be attributed with author’s name and this full copyright notice. For other uses, contact copyright holder.