WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2001-2022
After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble down the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.
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“Graves, eh? You had it really good. We’d have loved to have our da dancing on our grave. They would just pile our corpses under an old broken down beer wagon behind the sewer works.”
When John Cleese and Graham Chapman (the two inside guys) went on to form Monty Python’s Flying Circus, they adapted this sketch for their live show. I remember as a teenager hearing a tape of them performing it, and laughing so hard my sides hurt for hours afterwards. The routine NAILS the we-had-it-tough rhetoric that so many of us indulge in our later years, as well as the eternal guy-group impulse to one-up each other’s anecdotes.
Rubbish! Aye had it much worse!
You had it much worse?
Haw, I had it even liverwurst and had liverworts all over my body!
Thinking about it the liverworts didn’t have it easy either; life of a liverwort starts from the germination of a haploid spore to produce a protonema, which is either a mass of thread-like filaments or else a flattened thallus. The protonema is a transitory stage in the life of a liverwort, from which will grow the mature gametophore.
I always liked Marty Feldman – didn’t know he used to perform with Cleese.
“What hump?’
Gerard: You nailed it.
Group is already infiltrated by the feds, hey?
JV, fuck the Feds. “ Their” terrified of freedom loving Americans,,,,,,
But then I’m not sure which is worse, feds posing as patriots,,,,,,,,,,or patriots, posing as patriots? Can be sooooo confusing sometimes
VI
My only problem with the video is that it cuts out the very beginning of the sketch and what’s worse, they leave off the punch line! “And you try an’ tell th’ young people of today that. They won’t believe yez!” Otherwise classic comedy. I always thought Tim Brooke-Taylor was very underrated. Loved him in “The Goodies”.
Up all night thinking about my predicament, the real problem has to be Patriots, posing as Patriots!
Fear not ,,, I’ve a solution anybody under suspicion,,,,,we water board with Carlo Rossi’s cheapest red wine. Not even the most devout pretend patriots can pass that definitive test.
Problem solved!
VI