I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrapyard.

[Philosoraptor]

READY TO KILL

TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
Against the sky
Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of
the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag
in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.

.......Carl Sandburg

[annabanana]

1. Thank you for posting that.

It is a fitting poem.

[Gabi Hayes]

2. I thought this was about Reagan's Air Force One propaganda backdrop for the

Fascist Rountable tonight on MSGOP

[hfojvt]

3. Carl Sandburg does not support the troops?

ruh-oh :scared:

I visited an ancestral German village in 2001. There was a war memorial with a statue of St. Michael holding a sword, and monuments with the names of the fallen of WWI and WWII. Near as I could tell by the surnames, every person on the monuments was a distant relative of mine. However, I cannot be proud of their service in WWII.

Good words there, but I wish he could have rhymed.

[Philosoraptor]

4. God DAMN I hate the war pigs! Don't you just HATE THEM?

[patrice]

5. Let's hear it for the pipefitters, and the carpentars, and the trash collectors,

and the software engineers, and the electricians, and the laborers, and the teachers, and the nurses, and the bus drivers, and the secretaries, and the road crews, and the grocery checkers, and the . . . .

All of those folks who get up day after day after day and slug away at their jobs without all of the "Glory", without all of the romanticizing, without a "band of brothers", without all of the media coverage, without all of the public tears, without bonuses or benefits beyond a paycheck, without job security, without medals, without guaranteed opportunity for advancement, without automatic status and admiration from the next and previous generations, without the thrill of the machismo or esprit de corps, without hiring preferences, without books, movies, magazine articles, blogs, websites and songs being written about them, without opportunities to visit foreign lands, without publicly financed celebrations, without statues in the park, without the expectation of anyone other than their families and friends to even notice their passing . . . .

I don't begrudge the Military anything any of its individuals has earned in the DEFENSE of this land and god-knows there are plenty of military in my family, so I know that some honestly think blind obediance can be good and I will not deny them the same right to decide what is right and wrong that I claim for myself.

BUT, I agree with Carl Sandburg and Mike Gravel, the Military Industrial Complex, the aggregate entity comprised of all of those fine military individuals, symbolised in that statue, the whole greater than the sum of its parts, controls not only our politics and our economy, but also our Culture, i.e who and what we are as a nation, and that control is not only Oppressive it is insensitive to the value and worth of anyone, any experience, that doesn't submit to that cold hard idol in its own soul.

[Philosoraptor]

6. ..........

[Philosoraptor]

7. ...........