As once the tyrant Tribute sought These new Caesars take all yet offer nought. Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, here I am, Stuck in the middle with you

rogerglewis May 10, 2018 4 Comments

With Two Prize Village Idiots on either side of the Atlantic Vyeing for Moron of the Year and possibly the Nobel Peace Prize. Such, level’s of degeneracy in the Civic realm have been known before and often.
This from Shelly in 1817 but if you prefer to try this from Edmund Burke in 1770
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/03/on-present-discontents-burke-opined.html , Or Going Way Back perhaps Plutarch on Solon’s reforms.
https://whenthecrisishitthefan.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/the-irony-of-reading-plutarch/

I was struck by this poem quoted by Shelly reading the notes to my Giant Sucking Sound Post looking at the French and American Revolutions. And how both Lost their way.

http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2016/11/the-giant-sucking-sound-sharp-intake-of.html

Shelly Wrote at the time of the early death of Princess Charlotte and the Execution of the Pentrich Rebels (1817). @page { margin: 0.79in } p { margin-bottom: 0.08in } a:link { so-language: zxx }

“The government which the imperfect constitution of our representative assembly threw into the hands of a few aristocrats, improved the method of anticipating the taxes by loans, invented by the ministers of William III, until an enormous debt had been created. In the war against the Republic of France, this policy was followed up, until now, the mere interest of the public debt amounts to more than twice as much as the lavish expenditure of the public treasure, for maintaining the standing army, and the royal family, and the pensioners, and the placemen. The effect of this debt is to produce such an unequal distribution of the means of living, as saps the foundation of social union and civilized life. It creates a double aristocracy, instead of one which was sufficiently burthensome before, and gives twice as many people the liberty of living in luxury and idleness, on the produce of the industrious and the poor. And it does not give them this because they are more wise and meritorious than the rest, or because their leisure is spent in schemes of public good, or in those exercises of the intellect and the imagination, whose creations ennoble or adorn a country. They are not like the old aristocracy men of pride and honour, sans peur at sans tache, but petty piddling slaves who have gained a right to the title of public creditors, either by gambling in the funds, or by subserviency to government, or some other villainous trade. They are not the “Corinthian capital of polished society,” but the petty and creeping weeds which deface the rich tracery of its sculpture. The effect of this system is, that the day labourer gains no more now by working sixteen hours a day than he gained before by working eight. I put the thing in its simplest and most intelligible shape. The labourer, he that tills the ground and manufactures cloth, is the man who has to provide, out of what he would bring home to his wife and children, for the luxuries and comforts of those, whose claims are represented by an annuity of forty-four millions a year levied upon the English nation. Before, he supported the army and the pensioners, and the royal family, and the landholders; and this is a hard necessity to which it was well that he should submit. Many and various are the mischiefs flowing from oppression, but this is the representative of them all; namely, that one man is forced to labour for another in a degree not only not necessary to the support of the subsisting distinctions among mankind, but so as by the excess of the injustice to endanger the very foundations of all that is valuable in social order, and to provoke that anarchy which is at once the enemy of freedom, and the child and the chastiser of misrule. The nation, tottering on the brink of two chasms, began to be weary of a continuance of such dangers and degradations, and the miseries which are the consequence of them; the public voice loudly demanded a free representation of the people.”

An Address to the People on The Death of the Princess Charlotte (1817). By Percy Bysshe Shelley. From the 1880 edition of The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Verse and Prose, edited by H. Buxton Forman.

or.

We Pity the Plumage but Forget the Dying Bird

From the Footnotes, Shelly refers to this Charles Lamb Poem.

X. On the 7th of November, Brandreth, Turner, and Ludlam ascended the scaffold. We feel for Brandreth the less because it seems he killed a man. But recollect who instigated him to the proceedings which led to murder.

“THIS IS ALL OLIVER AND THE GOVERNMENT.”: No doubt the contemporary press if searched would yield plenty of evidence of the hatred and contempt with which this government spy was regarded. Perhaps one of the most noteworthy utterances which he helped to inspire was Charles Lamb’s grim poem The Three Graves, published in The Poetical Recreations of the Champions in the year of Shelley’s death, and not as well known as it deserves to be, though given in Mr. Charles Kent’s excellent edition of Lamb’s Works (Routledge’s “Popular Centenary Edition,” without a date). I need not apologize for quoting the poem here. I give it from the Poetical Recreations.

“Close by the ever-burning brimstone beds,

Where Bedloe, Oates and Judas, hide their heads,

I saw great Satan like a Sexton stand,
With his intolerable spade in hand,
Digging three graves. Of coffin shape they were,
For those who, coffinless, must enter there
With unblest rites. The shrouds were of that cloth
Which Clotho weaveth in her blackest wrath;
The dismal tinct oppress’d the eye, that dwelt
Upon it long, like darkness to be felt.
The pillows to these baleful beds were toads,
Large, living, livid, melancholy loads,
Whose softness shock’d. Worms of all monstrous size
Crawl’d round; and one upcoil’d, which never dies.
A doleful bell, inculcating despair,
Was always ringing in the heavy air.
And all about the detestable pit
Strange headless ghosts, and quarter’d forms, did flit;
Rivers of blood, from living traitors spilt,
by treachery stung from poverty to guilt.
I ask’d the fiend, for whom these rites were meant?
“These graves,” quoth he, “when life’s brief oil is spent,
When the dark night comes, and they’re sinking bedwards,

—I mean for Castles, Oliver, and Edwards.”
Charles Lamb.

http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~djb/shelley/charlotte1880.html

Celtic Baards speak out.

Celtic Baards Speak Out.

And the Baards of wales would not give praises to the conquering Edward,
instead they spoke words of truth in poem and song
made insolence by violence of the Crown and
they were burnt at the stake for the truth they Spake.

What principality this that burns its priests for speaking truth against the tyrant.
The Baards of Cymru Eire Cornwall Brettagn, Syntagma & St Pauls
reach out to us across the energy of re incarnated spirit and language
Past Heroes deeds and words emulated to assuage

As once the tyrant Tribute sought
These new Caesars take all yet offer nought
once more we offer Insolence in Poetry Song rhyme and reason
to tell the truth thats painted Treason.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNjeBOgGus4&feature=share