Somebody Else's Carelessness

Or the story of  'The Irishman and His Donkey'.....

Where I grew up, the English were very English indeed,
they thought they always had the best,
and they were the best at everything.

What they were particularly good at was telling lies
about other countries to comfort themselves
about how much better their lives were
then everyone else's in the world.

Often they were sly about it too,
they talked about it highly indirectly
-through the metaphor of animal husbandry.

They often talked about 'The Irishman and his donkey',
and how when one day the man had no feed for the beast
he made it accept no food that day, as if it was of no matter.
And how often the poor Irishman repeated this pattern
and lived within his means until his beast of burden
could carry no more, in this life at least, it died of starvation.

This was the English way of explaining to themselves
the effects of the potato famine of the 1840's,
where selectively across Europe crops failed,
and explaining why the Irish population who survived
left for America-it was all there was left for them to do.

This was also the English way of explaining to themselves,
without ever appearing to admit it, that if you have an empire
and mismanage it well enough that it's population starves
then you will lose your empire in the end, but by then
the story has to be about somebody else's carelessness.