A pertinent poem

(Originally published May 23, 2012) I first read this a few years ago, and it kind of stuck with me.  More and more, as things get more and more interesting around the world (bank runs in Greece, possible end of the eurozone, etc), this poem makes more and more sense.  I think the copybook heading of our time might be "You can't get something for nothing", or maybe "There is no such thing as a free lunch".  Anyway, I give you Rudyard Kipling:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

by RUDYARD KIPLING 1865 - 1935

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,

Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,

But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come

That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Well now that you mention it...

Holy Cow, I'm not sure how I've muddled along watching the antics of of the left as long as I have without realizing this:

As has been said so many times and with unassailable accuracy of the Left, creation is beyond their ken; they are utterly incapable of it. They can only pervert, degrade, defile, and destroy.

Which upon reflection is of course true, unless we're talking about creating efficient prison systems or methods to dispose of the millions of bodies upon which socialist utopias apparently must be built. A statement made in passing by Mike, obviously a smarter man than I'll ever be.

Memorial day 2021

Two for you today. First from the immortal Gipper, followed by one from the inimitable Rudyard Kipling.

A Time for Choosing

But freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it and then hand it to them with the well-thought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free.

– Ronald Reagan

The Veterans

Written for the Gathering of Survivors the Indian Mutiny, Albert Hall, 1907

To-day, across our fathers’ graves,
The astonished years reveal
The remnant of that desperate host
Which cleansed our East with steel.

Hail and farewell! We greet you here,
With tears that none will scorn–
O Keepers of the House of old,
Or ever we were born!

One service more we dare to ask–
Pray for us, heroes, pray,
That when Fate lays on us our task
We do not shame the Day!

- Rudyard Kipling

Pimpernel Smith

 

"Pimpernel Smith" is a 1941 movie, featuring National Socialists appropriately as the bad guys, and Leslie Howard as an english professor who continually outwits them.  I cannot speak to the merits of the movie, but this quote is good, and hopefully prescient.  It is from a scene at the end of the movie, when Professor Smith has been captured by the gestapo:

General von Graum: Mm. We can afford to make a loss, our profits will be tremendous. Tonight we march against Poland, and tomorrow we'll see the dawn of a new order. We shall make a German empire of the world... Why do I talk to you? You are a dead man 

Professor Horatio Smith: May a dead man say a few words to you, general, for your enlightenment? You will never rule the world... because you are doomed. All of you who demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred. And still, you will have to go on... because you will find no horizon... see no dawn... until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers. And one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words...  

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats wrote this in 1919, after WWI and in the midst of the Spanish Flu epidemic.  His pregnant wife was recovering from the flu when he wrote this.  Mortality rates for pregnant women were as high as 70% (not .7%, nor yet .03%) with that version of the flu.  "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, ...The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." Sounds pretty familiar today in early 2021.  It is faintly comforting to realize that the world has been here before, and that better men have felt the same churn in their gut over the situation, but it doesn't make the situation any better.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight; somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?