The aircraft make a sound that hurts, a deep roar that cracks the top end of the hiss on my head. From left to right it flows, from the distant land of rigorous R&R to the North down across the deserts where we live and on over the strange apparatus that makes up the towns of the south. Just as the sound fades to nothing we see the black bombs drop from the wings to the ground where they explode in a flash of fire and black smoke, using the precious oil as fuel for month-long fires. The sound reverses, fading in from south to north as the computers return the planes to their bases resting tranquilly in the foothills of the greener European mountains. What style, pilot less, without windows - if only the targets could be the same. Let's agree on a planet out there and send out all our machines to fight for whoever wishes to and leave the rest of us to get on with things like living.
The history we used to be taught was about Kings and Queens, Politics and envy, wars, the big things. We forget that wars just facilitate a short life of thuggish dictatorship, which fades to a vacuum that is filled by the creeping historians who write it all up as they want. Real history is how we laid fires, what we did for food and shelter, things that seep into the fabric of existence, that gives us mannerisms and ways of doing things that we can trace back for thousands of years. There is behaviour that is a combination of evolution and instinct, of folk memories and day-to-day existence. Stuff Starkey and his pompous, snobbish attitude to living history. I imagine he has to shake the dust off himself after a heavy day of analysing the long dead we used to have in command. Centrism has won and real history is much more interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment