Count Down

[poliphilo]

Certain clever-cloggses, including the poet laureate, are saying we ought to have a state funeral- on a par with the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill- for the last surviving veteran of the Great War.

At present there are 11 surviving veterans- all of them well over 100. So, lets start the count-down:

Eleven green bottles
Hanging on the wall,
Eleven green bottles
Hanging on the wall,
And if one green bottle
Should accidentally fall.....

No, no, stop it! Let's not.....

Quite apart from the ghoulishness, these men don't belong to us. If they belong to anybody it's to their families and friends. That bit of their lives when they were soldiers is long, long ago and since then they'll have done all sorts of other things- more important things- like having babies and grand-babies and grand-grand-babies. There's more dignity in riding to the local crem with your loved ones driving after than in being shouldered down the abbey aisle with Prince Charles and Tony Blair in attendance, shedding their manly tears. Besides, this willingness to turn Grandad Jack into the universal soldier and stick him at the centre of a nationalist-crybaby-wankfest belongs to the same "Your Country Needs You" state of mind, subordinating the individual to the corporate, which got us into the Great War in the first place.

For shame.

So, shove off, Andrew Motion- go write one of your "poems".

Comments

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

Making symbols out of unknown soldiers harm nobody, but these aren't symbols but real people and I'm definitely with you on this one. Let the military and the PM send letters of condolences to the relatives if they feel the need, but don't let them hi-jack such a private thing as a funeral. The Cenotaph is there for those purposes.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

Of course, these days, what with DNA testing etc, there can no longer be any such thing as an unknown soldier.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

And thank God for that. I'm always wary about absolutist symbols like "The Unknown Soldier", even if my melodramatic side is drawn towards them. We know that unknown soldiers left families behind; parents, siblings and sometimes off-spring. And we know that they too participated in atrocities of every kind. We cannot just imagine them as some generic hero to the Motherland!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Someone- some French visitor, I think- travelled round Britain in the 20s, took note of all the war memorials and came out with the line that the religion of the English is the worship of dead soldiers.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Motion is the very model of a literary careerist. I think of him and Robert Southey as two of a kind.

[catvalente.livejournal.com]

*wry smile*

My grandfather is named Grandad Jack.

Not quite as funny as John Thomas, which is his actual name.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

He-he-he....

My grandad was called Cyril.