Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough

One bomb in London
is worth ten in Belfast:
during our little local war,
the "Troubles", as we called it,
our guys, the IRA,
were taking a crash-course
in media manipulation.

The ancient enemy, the so-called
'peacekeepers', shipped in
from Across the Water, the very
reason and cause for resentment,
assured the international press
that the Irish were incorrigible
liars, a crowd of sectarian hooligans.

Especially (don'cha know) the Catholics,
a suppressed, priest-ridden people,
moaning, always moaning.
And the press believed it, didn't even blink.
One has a pained admiration
for smooth, practiced liars,
but this one takes the cake.

Well, I thought it was stupid,
when our crowd decided
to rattle these people in Britain,
to set off bombs in their capital city,
give them a taste of their own war,
let their own people suffer and feel it
just as we did at home.

The Irish often complain
that the English don't understand them,
(our genial hardness, our velvety aggression)
but it is clearly, unequivocally true
that we don't understand them, either:
geography may play its little games
but our mental worlds will never meet.

With a bit of effort on both sides,
in recent times, in spite of
the open running sore of the North,
(the 1998 Agreement doesn't work)
we overcome all the ancient differences,
learn, tentatively, to live together,
through football, music, the pub culture.

It can be chancy, uneasy, tense,
(local accents can be a social minefield),
but in thousands and thousands
of random personal connections
you can feel that it works, the English
are just as impatient as we are
to dump the past, lay history to rest.

Eight centuries of occupation, the near
destruction of a cherished ancient culture
takes a bit of getting over; now, at least,
we are a free and risen people,
with a freedom we had to fight and pay for,
(the only freedom worth having)
but our young neither know nor care.

Maybe, that is not such a bad thing ....

How many Americans think of 1776
on a daily basis? Just about none.
How many Americans think of their country
as a beacon of freedom? Just about all.
It's a very good thing to love your country
(after all, it's where you live); but it's a very
serious thing to surrender an ounce of freedom.

Now we turn to our American cousins,
with so many of our own people among them,
hoping to see them raise (again) the standards of truth,
what we have come to expect of this shining nation,
let it act as a champion for the poor and downtrodden,
let it mean what it says about freedom,
let it stop this military Empire in its tracks.

The bombs in London:
ahh, the bombs in London --
I say the same as I said
twenty-five years ago:
No, No, and No again!!!
It doesn't work with the English.
They don't get scared. They fight back.
And that makes me think
Cui Bono?
Who wants them to fight back?

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PS - The title is from Betjeman, who disliked intensely the functional and industrial architecture of Slough (southwest of London, near Heathrow Airport) and was more or less begging the Germans to bomb this area if they had to drop bombs on England. The city (quite ugly) survives and Betjeman is not popular.