This was written in Word 2007 this pm in about an hour, but Worpdress can’t format it properly for me. The verses are in sets of lines, 6,4,6,6,4,4,6. I wanted it to be a compound sonnet of 8’s and 6’s but this didn’t work out. You will have to reformat it yourselves and you will see how it works.
David Davis
I’m going through a barren patch and can’t think what to write
About the things that sadden us, and tell us who to smite.
Our masters all contend to occupy the common ground
Of centrist statist nannying, a strident baleful sound
Of bullying directives that the telescreens project,
Its loudhailers all in unison, whatever you select!
To live through the endarkenment, a fate none comprehended
A mere 50 years ago – and now for thought-crimes apprehended…
On charges-arbitrarily…designed to spread confusion
By political-correctness, that foul spreader of delusion!
The time has come, the Walrus said, to state that all’s been said
So many, many times all through our journey down to dread
Of counter-revolutions new, of Stalinista-rising
By overgrown big-children who say bourgeois life’s surprising
And repellent ‘coz if you do well, then someone else will suffer!
And anyone who disagrees is roughed up up the duffer.
The case for slating Fabians, and execrating Gramsci
Has oft-been made and published and would fill a biggish taxi.
The LA and our brothers in the blogosphere so wide
Have written reams and tracts of facts, enough to bust the side
Of a treasure-chest so priceless that if all could read its words,
Then we wouldn’t need to hide our thoughts from anti-lib’ral turds!
When our England was a Garden and such gardens could be made
By you and me and those we loved, and States declined to aid…
The Devil entered in, all sly and cloaked in Christian notions
Made for credulous do-gooders, who applied his tasty potions
Of such offers for alleviating seemingly disgusting
Apparitions of injustice such as poverty and war!
The Peoples of the Gardens couldn’t wait! For they were lusting
For the pulling-down of those the GFNs said guard the Door!
But the GFNs – they lied and lied! They said their door would take us
To a nice new place – resettlement! – organic food would make us
Into Brave-New-People, fully-nourished and all standardized
Into British Standard People, fully EUcategorized!
So what is there for me to say? I cannot but admit
That my wish to write creatively has suffered quite a bit!
Good verses. I agree that we seem to have lost. We thought things were bad in 1979. They are immeasurably worse now, in terms of how degraded the standard of our people has become. 1979 wasn’t quite the Olden Days, before cultural leftism had taken hold. But there were still many people around who could remember a time before.
My biggest worry now is the effects of mass-emigration. We see foreigners in the streets. We can measure the rise of their numbers. We can add them to the weather as something to complain about. We are allowed, and even encouraged, to hold uncharitable opinions about them. What we don’t see is the steady and vastly more harmful disappearance of the brave and intelligent from our own communities. We should have got out in the eighties. As it is, we live in a country run, below the commanding heights, by its genetic dregs.
Sean, you are correct to flag this up. What’s left that’s now going and leaving is the people from what I’d call “the middle parts of (gained) fortune” ***. These did, the older ones, now dying or late retiring, make good under Thatcher. This is the second generation of people some of whom could have helped us, and who are fleeing.
Really, all the people that would have mattered and could have helped make a difference, have died. It’s not just poor old Chris, it’s all the others born between about 1915 and 1945, who we could have done with IN The Line.
You and I and all those in their 50s and 60s who are left, are anachronistic people born probably to rather old parents who remembered the Olden Times Better, and who lived in houses with books in them.
The late-middle-aged _transitive-succeedors_ (I have made up a new English metaword) born between say about 1955 and 1970 have bought places in the Balaeric Islands and Portugal and elsewhere, and crow smugly on Daily-Mail and DT message-boards, about how “WE Have Now Got Out of This Shit-hole!”
I think there should be contingency plans in place to preserve knowledge.
*** There’s an interesting WW1 novel, based on the writer’s western front life, called that, which is rather good and very sad.
I too enjoyed David’s verses. I particularly liked the rhyme of Gramsci with taxi!
As to Sean’s thesis, the exit of the brave and intelligent – when and where it happens – is indeed a bad thing. However, I don’t think that it’s specific to England. I myself have “been there, done that” twice – once in 1977 when I went to live in Holland, and again in 1990 when I went to the USA. In both cases I returned, after three years and one year respectively. In the second case it became very obvious, once living there, that the USA was going downhill even faster than the UK.
Personally, I don’t think we liberty lovers have lost yet – although there are, obviously, very difficult times ahead. But maybe that’s because I look at things on a global scale, not a national one. If what you want is to have back the auld England of before 1910, then indeed you’ve lost. But if what you want is a global network of societies in which the human individual, truth, ethical behaviour and economic productivity are all valued, then I think we’re still in with a decent chance.
Why do I think this? Because our enemies’ system is “built on sand.” It has no moral foundations any more; and that is becoming increasingly obvious to more and more people, including the young.
I’m tempted to agree with you Neil, but with one proviso: lovers of ‘the political means’ further their ends by encouraging conflict. They don’t have to win wars, or even actively take part.
They don’t need better ideas than us, they just need enough convoluted nonsense to act cover, whilst they go around building up interest groups and setting them against each other. Bs baffles brains and all that.
You’re quite right, thermalcat. Conflict (whether within or between nations) is their way of doing things, not ours.
And thank you for the Franz Oppenheimer reference. More people should take account of his economic means/political means distinction.
Where are all these UK leavers going? Where is there you can go where –even if you find a free-market there–you will not be a friendless minority economic migrant yourself? The entire English speaking world cannot migrate to New Zealand and that country seems to have its fair share of leftist scum also. All these migrants after a better life don’t seem to be doing much to stop socialistic evil in their chosen destinations.
So where do you think you can go to escape leftist scum? Either we fight them or we lose. The crash is still the best hope of lighting a fire under apathetic arses.
That is a hole in my argument I’ve been thinking how to plug for some time. There was an undoubted decline in national quality after about 1900. The Somme etc only goes some way to explaining this. Mass-emigration is a possible cause. But I agree that I’d need to show how well the colonies of settlement did.
Another possible explanation is a sort of dark matter theory – that the country has just as much ability as it ever had – but pervasive misrule has ensured that only mediocrity flourishes. It’s a flattering theory, I suppose, and I will think about it.
The British State began to become a little more busy than from even 1815 to 1900, a little more interfering in people’s and institutions’ lives, I think in 1906. At least, that’s when the British GCSE History “Syllabus” triumphally-hails and eulogises “The Liberal Reforms”. Before that, children are taught today, 8-year-olds were sent up burning chimneys by fat cats, and women had to work 12 hours a day for six days a week for pittances, eating bread and water and wearing rags. And hungry men were all covered with oil all the time in photographs, and there was no glass in the windows and no toilets.
Oh, I forgot: and there were no doctors or hospitals.
I still say it is true that serious, potentially mortal, damage was caused by WW1 in that the more spirited, reflective and intelligent males tended to be those _not in reserved occupations_ such as mining, shipbuilding, railways, steel, engineering and power generation and also agricultural labouring. Thus these men could easily volunteer. Out of the British Male population of military age groups between 1913 and 1919, from which volunteers first came and from which later “available men were combed out” and conscripted, a population of rather over nine million, about 10% were killed in action (including a high proportion of younger officers), and another 45% were more or less seriously wounded, disabled or otherwise harmed. This has to have had some effect on the British gene pool.
Think of the “Artists’ Rifles” and how many decorations they won per unit soldier per unit time, in both wars, what proportion were graduates of all sorts especially the sciences, and what percentage was posthumous. (They morphed into the SAS later.)
Then we went through all this dreadful nonsense again from 1939-1945 in the second half of World War One. Although the statistics are marginally less terrible, they are only so by an order of about 50%, in a population only slightly larger than 1914.
You also have to consider when it was that the State began to interfere in things taught in schools. Granted that this only assumed horrible dimensions in the 1950s, there must have been an effect.
Next time we have a big war, I bet the reserved occupations will include estate agents and human resources managers.
Agreed. Enough personnel will have to be delegated by the State to sell off the homes of those KIA/Missing, etc. and to collect the proceeds for the Treasury. The “Departments of Human remains” are of course self-explanatory.
Sometimes, now and then, a good poetic and rhythmic line just pops into your head – usually while you’re doing something completely unrelated, like soldering stuff in an amp or trying to move wheelie-bins.
To survive and live, you simply have to write it down quickly before it’s gone.
Then you think about it for a few minutes, and the rest of the story comes.