In a new piece of work, Joseph O'Connorresponds to Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as part of a series in association with Amnesty International to mark the 60th anniversary of the declaration
LOVE:Noun used among the earthlings; also verb, form of address, term of affection among them; frequent subject of primitive attempts at literary or artistic expression by their poets, bards, etc.
Definition(s):
The opposite of hate (James Joyce);
The same old thing that made the preacher lay the Bible down (Muddy Waters);
The realisation that another person is real (Iris Murdoch);
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower (Dylan Thomas - inebriate of the subspecies "Welsh", endangered);
What can happen in a time of cholera (Gabriel García Márquez);
All you need (The Beatles);
The thing I can't buy (The Beatles);
The thing for sale (Billie Holiday);
The greatest of these (St Paul to the Corinthians);
The thing that is lovelier the second time around (St Francis Sinatra);
The thing that is tainted (Marc Almond and Soft Cell);
The thing in which we are enfolded (Julian of Norwich);
The thing I am in - ooh-bee-doo - with Den-eeh (Deborah Harry and Blondie).
THE INDIGENOUS, known as humans, a weak and childish life form, profess these most blatantly nonsensical unrealities, going so far as to avow themselves, in pitiable manner, possessed of certain inalienable advantages, for which no word exists in our beautiful language, but which they, in their selection of grunts, call "rights". These they have organised into a charter, or statement, to which little attention is paid by the less snivelling of their rulers. This nodule of delusion, in their principle tongue (an ugly patois best suited to evading true communication) amuses by stating the following outrages: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." Yet remarkably, the great majority, while avowing the importance of these absurdities, have privately more complicated responses to the proposal of brotherhood. The following is a selection of transcribed material, recorded recently by our advance party of operatives in .
. . . I don't like yer man. I can't stick yer woman. Don't ask me about that crowd because you'll only get me going. Look at the hairdo. Look at the walk of it. I'd say she says more than her prayers, wouldn't you? Course you know about him. Did you never hear that? Sure, that's well known. That's gospel fact. They're ignorant, they are. It's the way they were raised. Course I'm tolerant to the last. Don't care where anyone's from. They're equal in my book. Give everyone a break. I'm big into that. I was anti-apartheid. My cleaning lady is Chinese. I can't abide intolerance. I don't do prejudice. But you know what they're like. They can't help it, God love them, it's in their DNA. Not that I've anything against them.
They stick to their own. Oh, thicker than thieves. Don't want to know the rest of us. Don't want to mix in. Think they're better than us. Their discos, their pubs. Equal rights they want now, if you don't mind, Missus. Their rights and their dignity and the front of the queue, and the hand in your face for whatever they can get, but you can say nothing these days, so I keep my opinion to myself, but between you and me, and a hole in the wall, I'd trust any living one of them as far as I could spit a rat. Not that I'm prejudiced mind you.
Oh, yes. I say nothing. But I watch. And I learn. I knew one of them once. No I'm serious. And I made the effort. Tried to make conversation. Went down to her level but do you think I got thanks? But see, what can you do? You're irrelevant these days. You're normal, you're nothing. And you cannot get through to them. Banging your head off that wall, so you are. World of their own. Away with the fairies. They're not the same, I'm sorry, but it has to be said. Even the way they look at you, the way they go on. They think scruples is a nightclub. Think ethics is in England. Think the 10 bloody commandments is a mountain range some place. Think the law is an ass. And they laugh at us, you know. Oh they are scuttering themselves laughing. And why wouldn't they laugh, says you? They're on the pig's back. They have friends in high places. The Irish Times is full of them. So is RTÉ. Sure that's well known. Did you never hear that? If Fintan O'Toole isn't one of them, he'd help them out if they were stuck. As for Tubridy - ah, I better not start.
But you can say nothing these days. You're branded if you do. It's political correctness gone bats, so it is. Can't have a joke. Can't have a good laugh. You're suddenly a bigot. Can't open your beak. It's the thought police I'm telling you. Orwell was right. Give them an inch and they'll take the whole mile. Next thing you know they're up on their back legs and yapping about their rights and their this and their that. If anything I'm too tolerant. Really I am. I take everyone at face value. I'm gullible. But you have to draw the line. I mean, really and truly, would you want any child of yours to marry one of them, being honest? I don't mean to be prejudiced. Ask anyone, they'll tell you. It's each to their own and hail fellow well met and the benefit of the doubt and whatever you're having yourself. But who in the name of Jesus do they think they are? What are they on? What are they like? Why are they trying to shove it down our throats? Why can't they keep to themselves?
They've one of them working in the Spar up above. I see him every day. Every day! Not one of the nice humble type, not grateful or anything. But bold as brass. The look in his eye. It's like: "I'm here. And I want my rights." But I don't like to say anything. Well these days you can't. Open your gob and come out with a joke and you'd swear you'd invented Guantánamo Bay or lurried your granny into Abu Ghraib to be waterboarded. They're organised, you see. You wouldn't be up to them. Want to change our way of life. And we'd want to wise up. You mark my words. We'll be sorry again we're finished. There's one of them next door to you. And they're talking to your kids. Pumping them full of nonsense. Propaganda. It's everywhere. Schools, universities. The box, the radio. They've Newstalk infested, and Gerry Ryan, and TV3. Vincent Browne is in their pay and so's the half of Dail Éireann, and Senator David bloody Norris is their secret commander, and just you wait and see if it doesn't come true. I may not be perfect. I'm not claiming that. But you go to bloody war with the army you've got. I'm all for people's rights. Give me a petition, I'll sign it. But Jesus, it has to stop somewhere . . .
THUS, THE EARTHLINGS, while professing adherence and obedience to "love", find a kind of inter-binding, and a solace from their pain, by generating noises such as those transcribed above, and other derisive emissions. And yet, as has been noted by the Ministry of Research, they fail to find the courage to live in freedom from love's tyranny. In private, they long for it, believing it makes them better, and their daubers and scribblers, as well as their children, are so obsessed with it as to make one pity the whole life form on this lonely and desolate star. So far from their excellence, they look up at the night, clinging often to their words and their sounds for consolation, and to the tiniest hope that they are somehow not alone on their rock as it glides through the nothing.
See:
We must love one another or die (WH Auden) (They must love one another and die, in truth);
Love ceases to be a pleasure, when it ceases to be a secret (Aphra Behn);
'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved (Alfred Tennyson);
All that matters is love and work (Sigmund Freud);
Love's pleasure lasts but a moment; love's sorrow lasts all through life (Jean-Pierre de Florian);
How strange, the change from major to minor, every time we say goodbye (Cole Porter);
Every man is a poet when he is in love (Plato);
If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be explained by replying: "Because it was he, because it was me" (Montaigne);
Many waters cannot quench love; neither can the floods drown it (Song of Solomon);
Two things a man cannot hide: that he is drunk, and that he is in love (Antiphanes);
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward in the same direction (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry);
You can't live without it - take a tip from one who's tried (Robert Dylan, primitive melodist, one of their bards);
You have never been in love until you've watched the dawn rise on the Home for the Blind (Dr Stephen P Morrissey, perhaps the strangest of their species);
There's nothing half so sweet in life as love's young dream (Thomas Moore);
Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love (William Shakespeare);
My love's a noble madness (John Dryden, a "poet");
Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement (William Yeats);
Don't know much about history/ Don't know much biology/ But I do know that I love you,/ and I know that if you loved me too,/ what a wonderful world this would be. (Sam Cooke, profession unknown, evidently not historian or biologist).
THUS, "LOVE" APPEARSfrequently in manifestly untrue and infantile statements, which are nonetheless widely believed and circulated among the earthlings. Take note: No translation into our language is possible for this term. Its use among the Secret Invasion Force (SIF), already in place on earth and awaiting further orders, has been sternly discouraged by High Military Command, as has the offensive term "human rights". Humans do not have rights. They were born to be slaves. These usages by the native earthlings are to be forcibly discontinued, by selective employment of torture if necessary, as soon as full colonisation of their planet is effected. Let loose the droids of war.
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ARTICLE 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.