Lawhobbit joins in the struggle against the Zargonian invaders by appending to Mike Vanderboegh's lyrics for "Anthem of the Zargon Hunters." It helps if you have this playing in the background as you read the lyrics.They came from outer space
Attacking Mother Earth
To end the human race
E-vil Zargons!
Zargons landing everywhere
But we know we have to dare
Evil scum with evil schemes
They can't destroy all our dreams
We know we must be strong and brave
Our homes and lives we have to save
We have to make invasion cease
So Mother Earth will be at peace
As our unerring bullets fly,
May this forever be our cry:
Eat hot lead, you Zargon scum!
You'll wish to Earth you'd never come!
Through all the fire and the smoke
We will never give up hope
If we can win the Earth will survive
We'll keep peace alive
Death to the Zargons!
Attacking Mother Earth
To end the human race
E-vil Zargons!
Zargons landing everywhere
But we know we have to dare
Evil scum with evil schemes
They can't destroy all our dreams
We know we must be strong and brave
Our homes and lives we have to save
We have to make invasion cease
So Mother Earth will be at peace
As our unerring bullets fly,
May this forever be our cry:
Eat hot lead, you Zargon scum!
You'll wish to Earth you'd never come!
Through all the fire and the smoke
We will never give up hope
If we can win the Earth will survive
We'll keep peace alive
Death to the Zargons!
The persons sponsoring this exercise in the NJ school have an inverted set of values (not to mention that they probably admire
ReplyDeletethe Zargones au fond)
These "animal rights" proponents, PETA and its followers are not without earlier parallels, although
in years past the larger society retained enough understanding of the distinction between human and animal.
Irving Babbitt, in his book Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston1919) remarks, concerning one ancestor in thought of these, " a person who seeks to get rid of ninety percent of the virtues in
favor of an indiscriminate sympathy do not simply lose his scale ofvalues. He arrives at an *inverted* scale of values."
The verse he quotes from "Poetry
of the Anti-Jacobin also has the following in it:
Mark her fair votaries, prodigal of grief,
With cureless pangs, and woes that mock relief,
Droop in soft sorrow o'er a faded flower ;
O'er a dead Jack-Ass** pour the pearly shower ;
But...
In friendless exile, of the wise and good
Staining the daily scaffold with their blood,
Of savage cruelties, that scare the mind,
The rage of madness with hell's lusts combined***
Seems apposite enough. That's where "empathy" leads.
Notes, bc I've had to clarify these details to others:
*the term "Jacobin", referring to the proto-communist French
revolutionaries derived originally and solely from the name of the
street where the association met, the Rue S. Jacques
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_Club
The "Anti Jacobin" was one title of a journal published in England reporting on the Jacobins. (Whose writers very likely included the some of those who waged the War of 1812, but one can't have everything)
Another memorable line:
A steady patriot of the world alone
The friend of any country but his own!
** "Jack Ass" this recalls, at least for me, PETA's carefully confined protest in 2003
when Palestinian [Arab] terrorists booby-trapped a donkey and sent
towards a bus stop south of Jerusalem. Donkeys more important than Israelis, suggests American animal rights group
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000239.html
***Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. this is not the passage Babbitt
quotes, but follows what is on p. 144 or so of Rousseau and
Romanticism The entire work is at Project Gutenberg.
all the best, cycjec
Middle school. Well, once upon a time quite a few teachers of middle school age children would have recognized the sources of the
ReplyDeletefollowing:
Quo usque tandem abutere, Zargones foedissimes, patientia nostra?
O tempora, o mores! ...Hic tamen nonnullis Zargones vivunt!
Zargones omnes exstinguendi; Immo vero, Zargo delenda est!
All the best cycjec.
P.S. the opening is adapted from Cicero's Catilinarian oration,
the closing is of course parallels Cato's famous adjuration.