A Small Compensation (a poem)
When teachers begin to attack the base
Of their own culture, its ideas and traditions,
Beyond mere criticism to full assault,
Poisoning its art with lethal theory
And deconstructing its literature, religion and history
In the light of an immaculate, elite morality
Born of the utter denial of its own darkness,
One could argue that the end is in sight:
What culture can survive such self-rejection
From the ranks of its tutors, curators and professors,
Teaching students to despise their own culture?
And I, for one, will grieve deeply
At the coming loss of the Western world,
Now hissing in the acid of its own self-loathing.
We shudder in shame at our founding fathers,
And once where we celebrated our common-wealth
We mourn the vision of our forebears' genocide,
Believing our foundations were laid in crime.
Colonial nations have no right to be
Proud or successful through the losses of others,
And thus implicitly forfeit their right
To exist. So be it. Let us curse our culture
As criminal and reap the punishment we deserve:
Enervation, corruption, dissipation, despair.
But as they say, every downside has an up.
And although I know it will improve nothing -
Once our criminal culture has been crippled
By its own self-holy hatred of its past
And the resulting power-vacuum filled
By the new-world's next colonising empire -
It will at least be quite diverting to see
The post-enlightened professors who hate
Religion, ritual, tradition and everything
Else about the West, cowered and kneeling
Under rifles towards Mecca, and the gender feminists,
After years of shrieking at the Western Patriarchy
For all its anxiety-inducing freedoms,
Happily barefoot in shawls and burkhas,
Content and relieved once more to be told
To shut-up and get back to the kitchen.