Toads by Philip Larkin

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets – and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Boy, you sure have lived a tough life if you went through all that. I remember back to World War II and must have missed out on all that pathology you describe.

“traditional US values” like locking up and torturing people who don’t conform to the extreme religious values of their priests in “mental health asylums”?

I spent a summer working in a VA psych hospital and never saw one priest. I did spend hours talking to psychotic men. Then all those hospitals closed and left lots of psychotics on the street.

they would ban newton and fleming of course robert fulton nowadays,

No, I have some knowledge of radical Islam, and nothing here is like that, or ever was, outside of a few cults.

Because that’s what happened a lot and still happens, and what a lot of people want to extend (back) to homosexuals, transgender people, mental health patients, and in cases even anyone who doesn’t prescribe to their branch of Christianity.

Forcing “morality laws” on everyone, including strict dress codes, especially for women.

Basically the Christian version of radical Islam.

I hear a LOT of Americans applauding Uganda’s radical Muslim government’s decision to make homosexuality a crime punishable by a mandatory death sentence and saying openly it should be the same in the entire world.

Do we REALLY want those “traditional values” back?

Heh, lookee up! This here’s a real “good one”!

“James O’Keefe Uncovers Possible Lucrative Money-Laundering Scheme for Dems”—
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/03/29/james-okeefe-uncovers-possible-lucrative-money-laundering-scheme-for-dems-n1682689
Opening grafs:
…[James O’Keefe’s] new journalism outfit, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), just released a video uncovering evidence of what O’Keefe calls a possible “money-laundering scheme” for the Democrats. Some individuals reportedly appear to have donated thousands of times over a relatively short period to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars to ActBlue and Biden for President, based on Federal Election Commission records….”

So O’Keefe gets the info and decides to go door to door to ask the “generous” donors if it’s true. And what does he find? Well…the kicker is that some of them are not aware they’ve donated that much money, and deny it.

And so, the “possible” part of the “possible” scam is that someone(!) is using the name of those people, who have donated money, to increase the amounts of their donations by rather huge magnitude; in short, their names are being used without their knowing it.

Pretty darn clever!! (Kinda what you’d expect from those naughty national scammers.

Hold on! Innocent till proven guilty, right.
…But why SHOULD anyone assume that, with their record, they’re innocent of anything?
And that’s a damn shame…but that’s how they seem to want it. (IOW, they don’t care…and, to be honest, why should they?)