Los Angeles County was the first county in the United States to exceed ten million people in population. By comparison, the state of Georgia had an estimated population of 10.8 million in 2021, That state gets two people to represent its interests in the U.S. Senate. L.A. County gets…. no, I don’t want to go there. It’s too painful to consider the disproportionate representation.

It can be said that no one with the so-called qualifications of Herschel Walker would ever get close to 40 percent of the popular vote in Los Angeles if he or she were to run for county-wide elective office. It says a lot about the brand-name loyalty of the GOP in Georgia that Walker could receive over 48 percent of the vote (over 1,700,000 votes). Fortunately, Reverend Warnock received around 100,000 more votes. The election NEVER would have been that close in Los Angeles County.

Georgia turns out to have 159 counties, and by population the city of Glendale, California would rank number 13 in Georgia were it to be considered a county. In other words, being the first poet laureate of the city of Glendale deserves at least as much respect from the entire population of the County of Los Angeles as one would give to a large county in Georgia, but with added context that Glendale has a library and art gallery that any city in the entire state of California would be happy to have available for its residents’ edification. I’m not sure that any cultural center in the 13th largest county in Georgia would be something that even Bakersfield or Hanford would particularly envy.

All of this is a preamble to the announcement by the City of Glendale that it is accepting applications to be its first poet laureate. The job pays $5,000 a year, so it’s obviously a part-time undertaking, but the honor is one worth applying for, should one be a resident of Glendale. If that doesn’t seem like a fair honorarium, by the way, one can always move to a very modestly sized county in Georgia and see how much the local taxpayers are willing to subsidize the art of verse.

The deadline for the post of Glendale’s first poet laureate is January 20th, 2023.

https://www.glendaleca.gov/Home/Components/RFP/RFP/3124/2961