This morning?After having heard the relatives of a 47 year old fellah who had survived the heinous dictatorship of a man he hated with all his heart, lost a son to this same Saddam person on a rumor, and had been feeding info to our intelligence services in hopes of speeding the transition? You know the guy, right? Three days awake and guarding his small business from looters with an old AK-47, only to be shot by a confused U.S. Marine?
On pondering this, it seemed appropriate to transcribe for your reading pleasure, this; the third appropration of an Ogden Nash poem in the short history of this journal.
Because (to borrow part of a line from a friend-I-never-met named Ogden?) when something chafes my ass, his talcum is always walcum. So to honor this-now-Extra Dead and Truly Poor Bastard... The guy lying-on-a-shelf-in-his-shop-and-his-head-in-an-other-bag? In the current mess called Baghdad... Here's a-textual-sword-like slash from a guy named Nash.
++++Goody for Our Side and Your Side Too++++
Foreigners are people somewhere else,
Natives are people at home;
If the place you're at
Is your habitat,
You're a foreigner, say in Rome.
But the scales of Justice balance true,
And tit leads into tat,
So the man who's at home
When he stays in Rome
Is abroad when he's where you're at.
When we leave the limits of the land in which
Our birth certificates sat us,
It does not mean
Just a change of scene,
But also a change of status.
The Frenchman with his fetching beard,
The Scot with his kilt and sporran,
One moment he
May a native be,
And the next may find him foreign.
There's many a difference quickly found
Between the different races,
But the only essential
Differential
Is living different places.
Yet such is the pride of prideful man,
From Austrians to Australians,
That wherever he is,
He regards as his,
And the natives there, as aliens.
Oh, I'll be friends if you'll be friends,
The foreigner tells the native,
And we'll work together for our common ends
Like a preposition and a dative.
If our common ends seem mostly mine,
Why not, you ignorant foreigner?
And the native replies
Contrariwise;
And hence, my dears, the coroner.
So mind your manners when a native,
please,
And doubly when you visit
And between us all
A rapport may fall
Ecstatically exquisite.
One simple thought,
if you have it pat,
Will eliminate the coroner:
You may be a native in your habitat,
But to foreigners you're just a foreigner.