When I was a little kid in school
I figured out the Golden Rule
for a happy normal life:
don't get involved with ambitious people.
They are miserable.
They want you to be miserable too.
Wasted years leave little time to rue
the wear and tear, the stress and strife,
the syncopation, the sheer agitation,
on the long rocky road to the cold white room,
to the final silence of the tomb.
So what do I think?
I think freedom means just what it says.
'Live free or die' is not just a license plate
glimpsed when driving from state to state,
(I confess it gave me a sharp little tingle
when first seen in rural New Hampshire)
and too many politicians stink.
That's what I think.
Let them live in their world of 'ayes' and 'nays'
and thread their way through the murky maze.
They promise change, but their smiles are strange,
and what do we see when their words abate?
They offer damn little, and it comes too late.
The people you see on TV
are not the real heroes of democracy.
The people who make everything work
wear shabby suits, worry about bills,
don't take holidays in the Tuscan hills.
These are the councillors, lowest of the low,
and on many a rainy chilly night
they gather in bare unheated rooms
and keep the system on the go.
Without such people, lights out, and 'Taps',
whole bloody countries would collapse.
O man, O man, O man
listen to what language cannot say!
In the antediluvian, incorrect past,
(at this distance, endearingly innocent)
colours were nailed hard to the mast;
we heard about Wops and Kikes and Spicks,
squarehead Krauts and simian Micks.
In these modern and more cautious times
we have our cheese-eating surrender monkeys
and brown-nose Washington Beltway flunkies,
and bigger and better political crimes!
Care for some freedom fries?
The real theory-to-action in politics
happens in dreary committee meetings.
So you can forget the banners and flags,
the TV lights, the glitzy conventions,
the debates, half-truths, and circumventions.
That's a total blind, all mirrors and smoke:
the hard work's done by anonymous folk.
stuff, I suppose ....
