quarta-feira, maio 31, 2006

What all schoolchildren learn

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I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.


Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarRead it and weep: Globe: Troops told Geneva rules don't apply to Taliban, (Archive).

This is Captain Nichola Goddard, a Canadian soldier who was killed in Afghanistan last week. She has my greatest respect and admiration; I have shed tears for her and for her family.



Now I have to ask: She died for mere thuggery?

We must love one another or die.

September 1, 1939 - Wystan Hugh Auden

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarI sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarA psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarInto this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarThe furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarFrom the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
Click to Enlarge / Click para AumentarThere is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

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Posted junho 01, 2006 4:38 PM by Blogger Doug /  

More of Cheney and Rumsfelds poisoning of the well of global goodwill,compassion, intelligence and a lot of other things that separate us from the enemy. Now we have Haditha on our hands and it all comes down from the mentality and ideology of those in leadership. As I recall it was about that time that we, the U.S. were essentially blowing off the shooting of an unarmed man lying under blankets. We have almost gone as far as saying it's ok to just blow'em away if they bug ya.