Downsides of a system

The worst thing about LiveJournal is the incessant memes. Far away from their original home in Dawkins theories about the possibility for an intellectual replicant, they have become a parrot-like repetition of another person's ideas, a way to fill up spaces that you don't have the originality to fill yourself creating an endless feedback loop that echoes round, increasing the noise to signal ratio with each iteration.

But then I noticed there was one about poetry and decided that maybe they are alright after all. Any excuse to pass on other people's good ideas, eh?

It's hard to believe that something written back in the 1930s could still conjour up the way someone feels abot a modern town, but evidently it is the case:

Slough

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

John Betjeman