After Brexit
Circling Round Self-Interest
I watch the news.
Scotland refuses.
Wants to go its way and wants
To stay in EU.
It’s an issue.
Everyone has something that they want to clinch
And will not give an inch or forfeit.
How to beat what eats the issue
Makes you blind and binds you.
To defeat self-interest is the issue.
Take the long-gone League of Nations,
Its creation to end war - post World War One -
Did some good, but still it failed.
World War II was on its tail.
Came the UN - still extant.
Now the EU, is it canting?
Things start out with good intentions.
Nature’s thing is to evolve:
Grow, contract, break down, dissolve,
Replaced by new forms and conditions;
The self-interest’s hidden skeleton.
Political by unintention,
Few convictions, few opinions,
I see pure idea and spirit,
Reason true and what's behind it,
What is missing and what is.
In this case what is, is always
Circling 'round, you guessed,
Self-interest.
"Der Tag" was the title of a cartoon that appeared in the London "Daily Express" (7 May 1919) as a comment on the Treaty of Versailles being imposed on Germany to end World War I. "Der Tag" was believed to be a prewar toast by German officers in honor of their future victory over the British but is here used ironically. The figures who are administering the "medicine" are the prime ministers of the UK (David Lloyd George), Italy (Vittorio Orlando), and France (Georges Clemenceau), and US president Woodrow Wilson. The "Big Four Pills" they offered were worth millions a box, referring to a popular laxative (made from aloe, sugar, and soap), Beecham's Pills, advertised with the tag line "worth a guinea a box." The medicine was worth a poem by the incomparable Scottish poet, William McGonagall:
ReplyDeleteWhat ho! sickly people of high and low degree
I pray ye all be warned by me;
No matter what may be your bodily ills
The safest and quickest cure is Beecham’s Pills.
They are admitted to be worth a guinea a box
For bilious and nervous disorders, also smallpox,
And dizziness and drowsiness, also cold chills,
And for such diseases nothing else can equal Beecham’s Pills
They have been proved by thousands that have tried them
So that the people cannot them condemn.
Be advised by me one and all
Is the advice of Poet McGonagall.
McGonagall has been derided as the worst poet in English history but claimed he was inspired to become a poet (perhaps after taking one of Beecham's?) when he "seemed to feel a strange kind of feeling stealing over me, and remained so for about five minutes. A flame, as Lord Byron said, seemed to kindle up my entire frame, along with a strong desire to write poetry." For a time, he earned 15 shillings a night performing his poetry at a circus while the crowd was encouraged to pelt him with eggs, flour, herrings, potatoes, and stale bread. Pranked with a letter that included a knighthood from the king of Burma, for the rest of is life he referred to himself as "Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah."
"Nationalism" appeared in the "Bangkok Post" on 30 June 2008, by Thiwawat “Mor” Pattaragulwanit. "I want my work to be thought-provoking, like you’re reading the papers with me, and I’m whispering in your ear," he remarked.