In my particular part of the world, there has been a schism about the poppy. Some people wear them in the traditional sense, ie to show respect for people that fought in the wars. But recently others have used the same symbol as a way to express jingoistic nationalism. And to counter that another group has become anti poppy in a big way.
Me being Scottish but of Irish Catholic ancestors, tends to get caught in the middle of all of the above. I've had to explain my poppy more this year and last than ever. People have challenged me and called me both a Nationalistic warmonger and a traitor to a cause, also one silly gentleman tried to remove the poppy from my jacket as I was leaving a shop. I didn't resort to violence ( but I wanted to ) instead I cursed him in Irish Gaelic. He fucked off into the sunset.
So as part of something else some coincidences happened. Them being :
I was asked what one of my favourite poems was.
I was asked to take a photograph that illustrated or showed the essence of the said poem.
I was sent a youtube link which happened to have elements of the above in it.
The poem in question is one we all got at school ( in the UK at least in the 1980's )
Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The youtube video, is an unveiling in 1927 of a memorial to the CameroniansScottish Rifles. The man who is the guest of honour was know by my Grandad and his generation as Butcher Haig. I have spat on his statue at Edinburgh Castle often with no remorse, he was really a cnut.
This is the vid :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrIG05MfrzI
And the photograph I took in March of this year, and then after the above treated in a pseudo sepia tint, is this :
Dulce by
Pat McGuire2011, on Flickr
What is resonant for me is that My Dad's father was in the Cameronians, and was a Lewis gunner too ( like the guy lying prone ) it's not him that the statue was modelled on, it was every lewis gunner or soldier who took part in that hellish escapade. That war to end all wars. But no one listened.
After the war, he couldn't work in a coal mine any more due to his wounds, so he became a mason ( the job not the social club). Then 30 odd years later his older son ended up in the same Division. Doing the same kind of thing, and coming home to the same kind of stuff as he had. Then my Dad did his bit in the 1950's and my Mothers family did Korea and Malaya. In the 80's my cousins did Northern Ireland. In the 90's my nephews did Serbia and Kosovo, in the 2,000s they did Iraq and Afghanistan ( along with a few other bits and bobs ). And when they come home it's still the same old shite. i.e no one cares, or worse, people try to tell them to "fuck off back to Ireland" ( my nephew Chris hates that, he was born in Motherwell ) so tells them to fuck off back to Normandy or Denmark or wherever their bastard parentage would have been. And the other side of the coin is people expecting people like me, because my name happens to be overtly Irish, to somehow be staunchly republican ( not in the same way as the US of A folks..) or at least cast a wink to the "cause".
And when I tell then that they are all full of shite and this is the 21st Century and we should really be above all of that. They fume and shout and call me a traitor.
Well, I'll tell you who I think are traitors. Cunts that send people to wars for money or because they are too shit scared to do it themsleves. Traitors to humanity. People who could use diplomacy but instead use brinkmanship. It's always "with deep regret" these ball aches declare war from afar. Rarely does the guy who says "this is the last resort" actually lose anything apart from sleep.
You can probably tell, I'm a wee bit annoyed, not at you guys, but at the whole fucking thing. I'm all for people fighting for survival. People defending themselves by proper means, I'm not a pacifist because I'm scared in case I get killed. However I won't fight for some politician or fake ideal just because some arsehole tells me to. I would have been jumping out of perfectly good airplanes back in 1987 if I hadn't discovered that playing guitar in a band got me laid. I still wonder if I'd have been any good at all at the military thing ( peacetime stuff would have bored me then, I'd have been gung ho as fuck until I saw the Elephant. )
Now I'm to old to find out, but I know for sure that if any of my kids wanted to join the military, they would need a bloody good reason first.
