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PostPosted: 07/20/09 5:32 pm • # 1 
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What Keeps Mankind Alive?
(Weill/Brecht 1928)
You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that's where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive?

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts


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PostPosted: 07/21/09 11:10 am • # 2 
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Do you ever just want to call up authors and argue with them?

I like that poem, except for the last stanza. It's all true--but I want to argue that we're kept alive despite all those things, not by them.


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PostPosted: 07/21/09 1:22 pm • # 3 
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green apple tree wrote:
Do you ever just want to call up authors and argue with them?

I like that poem, except for the last stanza. It's all true--but I want to argue that we're kept alive despite all those things, not by them.
true enough. but i don't think that Weill meant ONLY beastial acts, do you?


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PostPosted: 07/22/09 1:26 am • # 4 
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no....but still. am I reading it wrong?


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PostPosted: 07/22/09 5:03 am • # 5 
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green apple tree wrote:
no....but still. am I reading it wrong?

i don't know.

i don't think that ANYONE, including Weill thinks that mankind is universally beastial. i think what he is saying is that underneath the veneer of civilization, there are monstrous undercurrents.

how did you read it?


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PostPosted: 07/22/09 10:17 am • # 6 
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I read it as him saying that the bestial undercurrents not only existed, but were necessary for our survival.


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PostPosted: 07/22/09 2:40 pm • # 7 
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green apple tree wrote:
I read it as him saying that the bestial undercurrents not only existed, but were necessary for our survival.

i can see that, green. i won't debate your take on it. he very well might be saying that. keep in mind that he wrote that just prior to WW2.


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