The Last Days of Humankind 2
Today is Thursday, 4 September 2008.
Dear "trying to be patient",
Well, excuuuuse me, for trying to deliver a well-pondered reply, instead of blaring the first point off the top of my head. I'm trying to be respectful of commenters, not doing the Rush screaming thing.
The translated scene from The Last Days of Humankind is, by the by, the beginning of my reply. Stages must be set.
_______________________________________________
THE LAST DAYS OF HUMANKIND 2
“Here in thin gray tombs of newsprint, in silent forests echoing with blood and iron, nothing remains in the world but this: screams, cries, fragments of bodies, curses, and the deafening silent voices of perishing millions constantly, justfully, accusing me of still being alive.
Did I create this world merely by seeing it for what it is?
Yes: this arm should crush the world’s evil with a single blow. This mind should force humanity to resist its own extermination. This voice should … alas, alas, cannot prevail against blood and iron.
The logical conclusion: you’ll die for something, Some Great Thing, a random, rancid slogan upon your lips …
Honor? Sure! Glory: Why not? The Flag: no problema. Fifty-Four Forty or Fight. Don’t give up the ship! I have not yet begun to fight! Manifest Destiny. Remember The Alamo, or The Maine, or the World Trade Towers. The Gold Standard. The Free World.
OUR WAY OF LIFE!
What are these? What are these, always more precious than life?
And why, you leaders, who lead, never from the front, but always from the safe behind, why do you demand we have such contempt for death, the unknown, “that land from which no traveler returns”?
Did the dead, before death, know what Death was?
The dead hardly knew what Life was, ‘til shrapnel occupied their flesh, ‘til poison gas invaded their lungs, and an “animal” [O, when we are inhumane, don’t we humans delight to slander vertebrates who never invented ideological mass murders?], moments ago as human as you, threw himself over the barbed wire, ran and crawled and bled across No-Man’s-Land, lept into your trench, his bayonet against your chest, threatening you, now another “animal”, and there, finally, at The Abyss, you discovered what life was.
Later, after dispatching the wounded, like a casual gunshot to the heads of horses lamed, your superior officer boasted: “My boys laughed at death!”
You shut up, while he boasted.
As always, you shut up, were silent before The Man, your superior, God’s superior, the power of life and death in his hands, the Self-Consecrated Uncreator of the Created World.
Your “superior” was promoted, you shut up, and everywhere profit fattened on death, misery, and despair.
“If I’d only known”, you sigh (those with lungs left to sigh).
Surprise! The war of the rich, the fight of the poor.
“Ich hatt’ ein’ Kamerad”, some soldiers sing. “I have a comrade”.
I had a comrade, friend, buddy, pal, brother-in-words, scholar, heart turned toward art and heaven. He was drafted and marched away, amidst the honor, glory, songs, flags, dismal rain, mud, lice, and lies of our Homeland, one more pale face packed into the troop-carrying cattle-cars of our Homeland, shipped like meat amidst the honor, glory, songs, flags, dismal rain, mud, lice, and lies of our Homeland, to the battlefronts of our Homeland.
(Security, indeed!)
Would that God had granted that he had died of this industrial processing which soaks homo technologicus in filth before it buried him in blood. Instead, following Goethe, my friend journeyed to Italy, the Italian front.
On orders, in Italy, for four springtimes, he burrowed beneath the earth, like a rabid rodent, a killer spider.
What was he hunting there? Lice for the Homeland? Poison gas for the Homeland? Shrapnel for the Homeland? Glory for the Homeland?
All his devotion to the secrets of vowels, mortared and martyred by the vocabulary of Nationalist “Progress“: barbed wire, machine-guns, poison gas, tanks, mines, curtain fire.
My friend became the traveling-salesman-joke of arms factories, the guinea pig and guarantee, in his own flesh, of the superiority of his nation’s product, and the inferiority of Country Brand X.”
TO BE CONTINUED
___________________________________________
It's long been very public record that Pat Buchanan is a raving anti-Semite who opposes prosecutions of Nazi war criminals. Here's an excellent round-up of the evidence: http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20080904/cm_huffpost/123755
I continue to be disgusted by the number of Buchanan's fellow Republicans who will have anything to do with him. I don't know why Sarah Palin once wore a "Buchanan for President" button, whether to "make nice" [to an anti-Semite?], to suck up, or from conviction. One finds it impossible to believe that one who could get themselves elected a governor, had no knowledge of Buchanan.
It's long past high time that decent Republicans read Buchanan out of their party, and consign him to the toxic waste dump of his murderous fantasies.
Dear "trying to be patient",
Well, excuuuuse me, for trying to deliver a well-pondered reply, instead of blaring the first point off the top of my head. I'm trying to be respectful of commenters, not doing the Rush screaming thing.
The translated scene from The Last Days of Humankind is, by the by, the beginning of my reply. Stages must be set.
_______________________________________________
THE LAST DAYS OF HUMANKIND 2
“Here in thin gray tombs of newsprint, in silent forests echoing with blood and iron, nothing remains in the world but this: screams, cries, fragments of bodies, curses, and the deafening silent voices of perishing millions constantly, justfully, accusing me of still being alive.
Did I create this world merely by seeing it for what it is?
Yes: this arm should crush the world’s evil with a single blow. This mind should force humanity to resist its own extermination. This voice should … alas, alas, cannot prevail against blood and iron.
The logical conclusion: you’ll die for something, Some Great Thing, a random, rancid slogan upon your lips …
Honor? Sure! Glory: Why not? The Flag: no problema. Fifty-Four Forty or Fight. Don’t give up the ship! I have not yet begun to fight! Manifest Destiny. Remember The Alamo, or The Maine, or the World Trade Towers. The Gold Standard. The Free World.
OUR WAY OF LIFE!
What are these? What are these, always more precious than life?
And why, you leaders, who lead, never from the front, but always from the safe behind, why do you demand we have such contempt for death, the unknown, “that land from which no traveler returns”?
Did the dead, before death, know what Death was?
The dead hardly knew what Life was, ‘til shrapnel occupied their flesh, ‘til poison gas invaded their lungs, and an “animal” [O, when we are inhumane, don’t we humans delight to slander vertebrates who never invented ideological mass murders?], moments ago as human as you, threw himself over the barbed wire, ran and crawled and bled across No-Man’s-Land, lept into your trench, his bayonet against your chest, threatening you, now another “animal”, and there, finally, at The Abyss, you discovered what life was.
Later, after dispatching the wounded, like a casual gunshot to the heads of horses lamed, your superior officer boasted: “My boys laughed at death!”
You shut up, while he boasted.
As always, you shut up, were silent before The Man, your superior, God’s superior, the power of life and death in his hands, the Self-Consecrated Uncreator of the Created World.
Your “superior” was promoted, you shut up, and everywhere profit fattened on death, misery, and despair.
“If I’d only known”, you sigh (those with lungs left to sigh).
Surprise! The war of the rich, the fight of the poor.
“Ich hatt’ ein’ Kamerad”, some soldiers sing. “I have a comrade”.
I had a comrade, friend, buddy, pal, brother-in-words, scholar, heart turned toward art and heaven. He was drafted and marched away, amidst the honor, glory, songs, flags, dismal rain, mud, lice, and lies of our Homeland, one more pale face packed into the troop-carrying cattle-cars of our Homeland, shipped like meat amidst the honor, glory, songs, flags, dismal rain, mud, lice, and lies of our Homeland, to the battlefronts of our Homeland.
(Security, indeed!)
Would that God had granted that he had died of this industrial processing which soaks homo technologicus in filth before it buried him in blood. Instead, following Goethe, my friend journeyed to Italy, the Italian front.
On orders, in Italy, for four springtimes, he burrowed beneath the earth, like a rabid rodent, a killer spider.
What was he hunting there? Lice for the Homeland? Poison gas for the Homeland? Shrapnel for the Homeland? Glory for the Homeland?
All his devotion to the secrets of vowels, mortared and martyred by the vocabulary of Nationalist “Progress“: barbed wire, machine-guns, poison gas, tanks, mines, curtain fire.
My friend became the traveling-salesman-joke of arms factories, the guinea pig and guarantee, in his own flesh, of the superiority of his nation’s product, and the inferiority of Country Brand X.”
TO BE CONTINUED
___________________________________________
It's long been very public record that Pat Buchanan is a raving anti-Semite who opposes prosecutions of Nazi war criminals. Here's an excellent round-up of the evidence: http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20080904/cm_huffpost/123755
I continue to be disgusted by the number of Buchanan's fellow Republicans who will have anything to do with him. I don't know why Sarah Palin once wore a "Buchanan for President" button, whether to "make nice" [to an anti-Semite?], to suck up, or from conviction. One finds it impossible to believe that one who could get themselves elected a governor, had no knowledge of Buchanan.
It's long past high time that decent Republicans read Buchanan out of their party, and consign him to the toxic waste dump of his murderous fantasies.
posted by HH at 11:43 AM
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