When Scapegoats Look on the Bright Side of Life
(From The Triumph of Strife: an homage to Dante Alighieri and Percy Shelley)

We’ll try and “keep you posted,“ if we can
Whenever we decide to bomb your towns
You people have to understand our plan

To photograph some smiles and not your frowns
Our voters do not want to know your woes
They do not care about your falling-downs

We’ve frightened them with tales of gruesome foes
Who’ll sail in rubber rafts to storm our shores
If we dare “cut and run” – which only shows

How easily our sloganeering bores
The trained and dulled so that our line they toe
Allowing us to treat you as our whores

Though, “sovereign,” you’d surely like to know
Why we, your occupiers, will not go

But this we cannot say just yet or soon
If ever, as you no doubt might suspect
Perhaps after we go back to the Moon

Or on to Mars, some old rocks to inspect
For if we told you what we have in mind
Our schemes to grab your oil you might reject

And since we’ve killed so many of your kind
You might kill more of ours, you ingrate swine!
How dare you try to place us in a bind

Refusing to endorse our latest line
Of propaganda coined to make you look
The fall guy in a moral not too fine;

A scapegoat story from an ancient book
To put you on, and get us off, the hook.