A Brief History of Obliviousness
Based on a theme by Sergio Leone
Somewhere in the desert, once upon a time
Out in Arizona beside a railway line
There’s a rusty windmill squeaking in the sun
In the station master’s office a man is toying with a gun
His partner in an overcoat is waiting for a train
But in the silence afterwards just a lonesome harp is playing
It ends up like you’d expect
The hero lights a cigarette
And walks into a red sunset
Stepping over all the dead
The ones who didn’t stop to guess
What was going to happen next…
Somewhere south of Capricorn in the country I call home
About the same time later, a shepherd found a stone
It sparkled in the sunshine but it wasn’t any use
What happened next depends upon your version of the truth
The shepherd showed his master, his master showed his boss
For the years it took the smoke to clear
You couldn’t see the Southern Cross
It seems like only yesterday
The ships poured in to Table Bay
It’s hard to know what’s wrong or right
It wasn’t told in black and white
But every corpse in every ditch
Lined the pockets of the rich
The ones who died behind the fence
Crammed inside those frozen tents
When Kipling wrote his poem called If
They were redacted from the script
But anybody could have guessed
What was going to happen next…
Then there was that royal tiff they call First World War
Twenty million died but still, no one know what for
There can be no forgiving but it isn’t hard to see
What monsters it created in 1933
It started off with stones and sticks
Sometime in 1936
It began to escalate
November 1938
Just some shops with broken glass
And hardly any questions asked
And fewer still who stopped to guess
What they thought would happen next…
Of course it’s true of history you can prove anything
If you only find which butterfly was the first to flap its wings
So we tell them bedtime stories in whichever way we please
As if every different one of us couldn’t get the same disease
So draw whatever line you can
From Baghdad to the Bataclan
From Guernica to Badajoz
Does anybody give a toss?
From Karantina to Shanghai
From Tlatelolco to My Lai
You can go back all the way
To the very first crusade
If it helps you understand
You can blame it all on Uncle Sam
If ifs and ands were pots and pans
There’d be no work for tinkers’ hands
Choose your poison, pick a side
If all else fails, ask a child
‘Cos mostly it is just as clear as the nose upon your face
Exactly who’s responsible for this or that disgrace
For example just a year ago nobody could agree
Who’s to blame and what to do about the rising sea
They came from every country, they were the leaders of the world
They walked away ashamed each one by a sixteen year old girl…
The moral of the story’s this
You can ignore the bleeding obvious
Tell yourself it don’t exist
Purse your lips and clench your fists
Block your ears and close your eyes
But don’t you go and act surprised
When that beast goes stumbling
On its way to Bethlehem
And its time come round at last
Gets to bite you in the ass
If you want to know what’s coming next
Look out your window, take a guess