308 • A Sensible Choice?
Lock that ape in his airtight Rolls Royce
Till it stifles his snide, stupid voice.
Draw a line in the sand.
Send a sign to the land:
Maybe, this time, a Sensible Choice?
Three instructions for November 3.
254 • Monster hoax
Those tracks that we noticed, while skiing,
Suggest some gargantuan being.
Maybe Bigfoot is real?
If that print was his heel
Then his toes will be something worth seeing.
In a secular age, humanity’s innate yearning for supernatural guidance finds expression through the belief in, and adulation of, some improbable freaks. Lumpen, unruly monsters fascinate the American psyche, their stupidity presenting an intriguing counterpoise to inconceivable power. Still, only a couple more months before voters can consign one such oafish hoax to richly deserved oblivion.
223 • Apecraft (2)
My brother had trained his bonobo
To play a few tunes on the oboe.
I bought my baboon
A good contra-bassoon
Yet that night she eloped with a hobo.
I have been reprimanded (hounded, even) about a ‘misanthropic tone’ that supposedly suffuses this poetical blog. ‘Has mankind accomplished nothing you would consider celebrating?’ writes one disenchanted correspondent. Well, it has: the admirable Great Ape Project has urged that chimps, bonobos and other such anthropoids should be accorded the same basic rights as human beings (exactly which human beings remains open to question). And no less a territory than The Balearic Islands extended personhood rights to the Great Apes as long ago as 2007 (one of that tribe holds temporary sway in my home country). But – cf bulletin #222 here at My Dog Errol – such envelope-stretching can come at a terrible price.
222 • Apecraft
As I read in The Military Journal,
An ape’s reached the rank of full colonel.
Since beasts lack a soul
He can act out the rôle
Without fearing Hellfire eternal.
We’ve grown accustomed to press scaremongering concerning military robots, which pictures Artificial Intelligence running berserk on battlefields of the future. Far more alarming, however, are reports that our Masters of War have already appointed creatures – without conscience, yet close to us in tactical reasoning – to execute their damnable machinations. Has humanity learnt nothing at all from the PG Tips scandal of the 1970s?