Dirty little secrets, Stained glass windows or The tiger rodeo

Behind the bonhomie, the family dinners and the football
lurks the question no one wants to be asked:  Where are the bodies?

Scratch the surface,  maybe six feet, and dig beyond that minor irritation to find a deeper secret:
we’re all thieves – and worse.

“My dear chap!”

Liberty: Every huMAN should be free to do as he pleases.
(The patriarchy only died in its media representation) 

Law: an impediment to the above.  
(Regulation is the spoor of Lefties.)

Dig.

Stones – one piled atop another, arrowheads and tips of spears, bronze, iron, ceramics, clay tablets and their fragments of glory and of conquest.  Saga, siege, religious text.  

Follow an aid worker into the bush and see fly-blown corpses among the dung of cows that were recently theirs.

Theft.

London – New York – Paris.

Frankfurt, Moscow.

Beijing, too, once they work out how a communist system can entertain merchant bankers without becoming capitalist. Everything's for sale.

Rape and pillage.  Vikings.  Khans.  

A legacy of cartoons and comedic sentimentalism.  Cue horned helmets.  

How the monks must have chortled as those cheerful Norsemen raped their asses and took off with all the gold and pigs.

The light fades in the room.  It’s quiet, save for the solid tick of unforgiving time.

Forgetful, more.

The legends of English trade manifest themselves.

Walter Raleigh.  Francis Drake.  Knighted by the biggest thief of all.  Tick.

East India Company.  The London Company.  The men who put the slave in trade.  Tock.

That nice man for whom Zimbabwe was originally named.  Tick.

Scions of City mining interests.  Tock.

Petroleum.  Tick.

Persia – Iran, 1953.  Abadan.  Bloody foreigners.  Tock.  Nationalising our assets.  Property.  Bought and paid for.

What’s ours is ours, fair and square.  Free-born men, and all that.

It’s only theft among the poor.

Boris!  Oh, Boris!  Tick.  Why did you have to die and leave us with that nasty little man?  Just when it was going well.  

Tock.

It’s not cricket.  Or baseball, for that matter.

But the system is the system.  From the playing fields of England, to the crystal towers of Washington – bugger the French.

Socialism?  Bad business, that.

Free enterprise is the way.

Just needs a little putsch in the right direction now and again.