12sep04: From Ms Voyeur Voyage

One performance only

We'll fly you over burning forests
We'll walk you through the starving hoards
We'll show you drowned and bloated corpses
At a price you CAN afford

You'll glide above the sky in comfort
You'll sleep your nights in quiet hotels
You'll sit and watch our views in wonder
Of mankind in a thousand hells

Voyeur Voyage

Auntie Jayne writes:

Dear Ms Voyage,

It just doesn't become a bleeding heart liberal like you to affect cynicism. To the average and, nowadays, increasingly disillusioned reader your message will simply be seen as limp and tasteless.

You should realise that most people know as much about the state of the world as Jerimiah-esses like yourself but as we can do so little to alter the paths that have been set: the best we can do is to sit and watch from whatever vantage point we have been allocated

To help you savour this momentous time perhaps some famous film quotes will help. I leave it to you to find their origin.

1. Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. What the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
2. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark by the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

If we are approaching the end of the world as we know it, forget the grieving for future generations, just rejoice that it's with some sort of bang and not with a whimper.

I do like your verses - good rhythmn with nice end-of-line rhymes and assonances. I also like the repetition at the beginning of the lines. Instinctively you seem to understand that poetry is not just concise semantics but digs down into our reptilian brain (or paleocortex) where the centres of emotions, anger, fear, humour and of love reside.

P.S.

It's clear to me that you are in some sense political and possibly think that "something must be done" so let me give you a small, sad, prosaic example.

Our main political parties are promising more choice in secondary education. That will mean parents will have a greater choice of schools for their children. This will also mean longer car journeys on the school run and, of course, more children will be driven to school friends who will now live further away. So more carbon dioxide and consequently more global warming.

But, according to the weekend press, our party leaders will soon announce that climate change is the biggest challenge to mankind.

Whatever the truth of global warming, it seems that all the great issues of today will be subordinated to small time political advantage. Are we like the cannibals who refuse to stop eating babies? They know what is right but the babies simply taste too nice.