Great Moments in International Bureaucracy

I don't know what's more laughable, the fact that some EU bureaucracy is creating an 80-minute poem (with dancing, no less), or that the "low-grade bank clerk" who masquerades as the European Council President is going to publish a a book of haiku poems. But only one item is objectionable, and that's the latter since it represents a mind-boggling waste of tax dollars. The EU Observer reports:

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) wants the EU's human rights charter recast as an 80-minute-long epic poem, accompanied by music, dance and "multi-media elements". ...The Vienna-based agency has opened a process of contracting a poet to devise a composition based on the articles of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and hire a company of performers to accompany a presentation of the poem with music, a dance interpretation of the piece and "multimedia elements", as well as what the tender refers to as "etc." ...Since speaking with the FRA, the page advertising the tender has since disappeared from the agency's website. A copy of the tender document has however been saved by EUobserver. The development comes as European Council President Herman Van Rompuy announced this week he is to publish in April an anthology of his three-line Japanese haiku poems.