Remember Our Veterans of Yore

Than bind her weeping stripes of ten thousand cuts, should we end her agony with a merciful slice of the vessel sustaining her heart and head? Yet who of us is willing and capable of the breach of God’s laws we have long averred? So, shall we ask the one whose insouciant nature disavows those laws and is fully capable to finish her? While George defaulted his mission not accomplished, does his successor own the brass to smother her withering flame of life? He does and he will—if we let him..

Should we then permit an array of TNT charges set around the hem of her gown, a petard with a fast or slow burning wick? Whoever ignites the quick had better own faster feet to escape the blast. Of these days, however, cakes of plastique and remote electronic gadgets obviate the need for cordite fuses, matches, and Mercurial feet. More blasphemously, shall we embrace growing relevant truth and tolerate the blare of L’Internationale and the roar of sunder birds above as they pulverize her pedestal with missiles on the day of 4 July? Why not? The ‘whiners and cowards’ say she is an irrelevant anachronism (if they are familiar with $13 words) and no longer consequential, for the huddled masses now enter another gate than pass through her golden door. In the name of fiscal pragmatism, will we acquiesce to the cynical draw and quarter of her limbs, the obscene stripping of her skin of patina, and render her hide and iron bones to bullets or discs of brass and copper for the mintage of the coins of the new realm? Once she is dispatched, will three mute monkeys warn us to mask our eyes, block our ears, and tether our tongues against the din from the rabble who demand her replacement with something more consistent with their new values and less odious than the former guardian of what was America? Perhaps orgasmic joy will finally come to the lemmings who authorized the razing of our maternal edifice. Lady of Liberty will be supplanted by a lean Adonis not shrugged or Attila reincarnated. Will the left hand of the colossus of New Rhodes raise a hand of peace and its right clutching a truncheon behind its back? Will the towering sculpture reveal a chest well chiseled, mouth smiling ebulliently, eyes kindly overseeing, and head of silver white, a gigantic dark Oscar in honor for the leading role upon the world’s stage? Will the The One who ordained Liberty’s demolition maintain her welcome to the weak and weary, that is . . . if those who come will heed the counsel from the three muzzled monkeys at his feet—emblematic of the new Benighted State of Amerika.

Not far southwest of Flanders and 100 years before Lady Liberty was conceived, the Common Sense of an English stay maker turned the world upside down and breathed his life’s breath into the bonny fires of rebellion in two continents. The tyrants of the sixteenth Louis and third George were thus divested of their unearned wealth and power over common men. Thus in a spiritual sense, Thomas Pain(e) was the progenitor of our Lady (replicas of her stand in France and Luxembourg). Sadly, though he knew her intimately within his mind, he could not have seen his lady dressed in her shining robe, her regal crown, the Law protectively cradled in left arm, and the beacon of freedom held high in her extended right hand.

The blessing of his fast and furious meteoric rise to fame was also Thomas’ inevitable bane of the descent of a falling star burning in the atmosphere of disrepute. On the coattails of the glorious pamphlet of 1776, he launched a more ambitious campaign in his mother land. He was brusquely repudiated by his peers. Spurned, he fell to the depths of ennui after his publication of the Age of Reason, which abnegated the tenets he had underwritten in Common Sense. Eventually, the mention of his name was unofficially abrogated by his peers, for his new words no longer warmed the cockles of their hearts. Back in America and at the age three score and two years in 1809, he departed the earth and was buried by his housekeeper in Rochelle, New York. Few attended his unceremonious interment. Some years later, a fellow Englishman dug up his bones. En route to the shire of Thetford, England the misguided thief lost Thomas’ remains. I assume Poseidon of Atlantis has embraced him since. Adieu and Bonny Voyage, Thomas of Pain. Will there ever be another one such as you?

Who will live long enough to weep for the Lady lost? What’s more, how many will survive and cry out against the rape of the one who for 120 years had hoist freedom’s flame so high? While he was champion for freedom, Thomas Paine said, What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. As he, I would rather not cry at her funeral while I am able to decry the brutal assault against her integrity before, not after, she is undone! If I (we) fail to overcome this burgeoning tyranny, I will weep no more forever, (1) for my candle is nearly spent. I hope a few will stand by my funeral pyre and say ‘adieu and bon voyage’ to the immortal spirit dwelling within me while I was alive and who never abandoned his temporary home of me. If my spirit and I could not preserve freedom’s flame for you, with pain, we now pass Liberty’s baton for you to do what we could not . We have stated our last piece and are prepared to join the fallen dough boys of the air above and within Flanders fields. (2)

Ye think me wax a wee hyperbolic

Or suffer fits o’ senile colic?

Or d’ ye think me tongue be

Lodged too deep in me cheek, ya see

An’ unable to be swallowin’ it?

The best laid schemes o’ Mice

An’ Men, Gang aft agley. (3)

‘Catch on you will

When you’re tumbling downhill’. (4)

Will there come another pain

In the arse the likes o’ Thomas again?

Me hopes I be one of many more an’ hence.

But will there be enough of us to heed an’

Rick his reid o’ Common Sense? (5)

1. I will fight no more forever, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, October 1877.

2. In Flanders Fields, Lt. Col. John McCrae, 1918

3. Robert Burns, The Mouse, 1785

4. Russia proverb from Warning to the West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1975

5. Rick his reid = Gallic pronounced with glottal trilled R’s: and reek his reed = ‘and heed his advice’.

Tomorrow, we will honor the 65^th year since the dough boys returned to Flanders fields.

Sincerely,

Albert W. Loescher & PILMOA