Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Monday, March 03, 2003

From our mutual friend Rob, who to the best of my knowledge has no blog and as such is barely legal, and thence to Ben, I am tearfully proud to bring you Poets for the War. The Devil may have all the best tunes, but it turns out, to nobody's particular surprise, that the anti-war (sorry, the cowardice) movement has pretty much cornered the market in poets as well.

I adore bad poetry. Bad poetry has got me through as many personal crises as good poetry, since they possess the same universality of human emotion but also imbue a great jolt of relief that there are people out there in far orse straits than I, and I don;t even have to feel bad about it because they have no idea how terrrible they are.

For example, the opening quatrains of "Taters and Bacon" show both a joyful rhythm and a deep and abiding respect for the culture of Islam.

Taters and Bacon

Take down Saddam like a sack of taters
Pay no attention to screamers and traitors
Anti-Americans, useful idiots and Bush-haters
Finish the job started by the Crusaders

Now the Big Dog’s wakin
In fear of Uncle Sam Saddam’s shakin
He says he’s WMD-free but he’s fakin
Bomb the sucker and make him eat bacon

Of course, if "Lloyd Drako" had a bit more of a handle on this sort of thing, he might have realised that the Ba'ath party is secular, so making SH eat bacon would probably not be quite the threat it might have been to, say, the Ayatollah Khomeini, but then let us not lose sight of the fact that Lloyd Drako is not very bright.

At all.

But the hits roll on:

Your lily livered liberalism is no more than a paper tiger
It is out of touch with the public geiger
Take away uncritical applause
What is there to celebrate your cause?

Of particular beauty here, of course, is the use of utterly inappropriate terms to maintain the rhyme, which saw "gloat" used as a noun directly above this unlearned and unlovely deformed child of a verse. A geiger measures shit, right? So it must be a functional metaphor to state the measurement of the public will, right? Sure. Definitely. And it was either that or "We'll bodyslam you like Jushin Liger".

However, the St. McGonnagal prize for most enthusiastic use of the Reader's Digest Rhyming Dictionary must go to this brave soul:

We’ve heard of insanity
we’ve heard of hell
we’ve heard of evil
in Iraq they do dwell.

Stories filter by many
athletes not immune
soldiers it’s expected
while too many oppugn

I'm not even going to pause to point and laugh at the absurd periphrastic present in the last line of the first verse. That would be to admire the eye of the elephant without paying any attention its enormous warty leathery arse.

Oppugn means to oppsoe or contradict. I know that because I recognise the root Latin verb oppugno; others might have encountered it in the specific language of the law or perhaps of politics. Given the functional illiteracy on either side of it, I'm guessing it was a half-understood attempt to find a rhyme for a line that makes no sense anyway. Are athletes not immune to the stories? Are they not immune to allowing the stories to filter by them? Are they not immune to the insanity, Hell and evil that "do dwell" in Iraq? Is this a reference to the Iraqi football team? It would be fucking fantastic if it were, but since the writer is likely to struggle to find the place on a map it seems somehow unlikely that he'll be down with its soccer team.

In fact, this is just too good to summarise. I've already steeled myself not to mention the incorrect apostrophe in the line "old coward's come out" ("I'm quite queer, dear boy"), or indeed the rhyme of "anti-Christ" and "hissed". It's a thing of beauty and a joy forever. No, really. And what I like best about it is that, at least in this section, the rhythm, such as it is, allows it to be sung to the tune of the Moldy Peaces' "Lucky No.9". All together:

Indie boys are neurotic,
Make my eyes bleed,
Tight black pants exotic,
Some lovin' is what I need

If there's a more cogent argument for war than that, I have yet to hear it. All I know is, some dudes in Baghdad're gonna get free.

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