The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #45383   Message #689017
Posted By: DMcG
13-Apr-02 - 04:38 AM
Thread Name: BS: Are you ashamed to be American?
Subject: RE: BS: Are you ashamed to be American?
As someone from the UK, I am hardly entitled to comment in this thread. However, the discussion about loyalty oaths made me immediately think of Wilfred Owen's World War I poems and in particular:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

(Trans: It is a great and glorious thing to die for one's country)