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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Victimisation as threat and control</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">She’s the village’s Force For Good –<br>or that’s the flag she sails under; <br>news of distant earthquakes, floods, <br>famines, ethnic or other massacres<br>are her stoke-up calls…<br>she’ll soon be knocking at your door, <br>or coming up to speak to you at the WI<br>or after church…</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">knowing that you know she knows<br>you know the details of just how fortunate<br>she thinks herself, to have survived<br>that terrible childhood (details vague) : <br>so by extension, you should know yourself, and show yourself, <br>fortunate too… by giving to the latest cause…</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Have her in for drinks, and her roving eye<br>will spot that electric towel rail you don’t now use<br>which would be just the thing which would alleviate<br>the widow Smith… Though, should that widow Smith<br>dare to grumble to her – and she’d sharply (with a smile) <br>remind her, aren’t we lucky, dear, we’ve got<br>the Social Services here, while they, poor things…</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">How she delights in, praises, our new outfits<br>which we bought last week in town! <br>We don’t need to be told what follows<br>as the night the day – we should have<br>a still-smart something to pass on to her…<br>though I’ve yet to see an African<br>caught on TV wearing my old Top Shop number…</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Sometimes, husbands take the mickey..<br>‘How is it that now we no longer hear<br>about the Burmese tragedy, Martha, now<br>the orphans of Darfur are in the news? ’…and<br>in private, joke to us about calling in Miss Marple<br>to root out the village emotional blackmailer…</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The one house in the village and the largest<br>is the one she least often calls upon, <br>and that only in the afternoon<br>when the housekeeper’s in, but the owner’s<br>still at work: Alan was a kid to five adoptive families, <br>three of whom were good… now he’s the owner<br>of a large industrial firm whose workers love him…<br>At their first meeting, when she tried<br>her own pathetic story, his curt<br>‘Oh get over it..’ has sealed their subsequent relationship…</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Somehow, I’ve never warmed to her<br>since that first visit, when she stood<br>dead-heading the geraniums around the door<br>while exchanging pleasantries…<br>and left me steeped in self-reproach<br>and communal inadequacy…</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Chaucer, with his perceptive and discerning eye<br>would have spotted this Martha of the many causes…<br>‘Methinks she has the more concern<br>for Mercie’s name, than for the human soul…’</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">*</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">He’s the spokesman for his faith – although<br>faith is a word that seldom elevates his speech; <br>perceived injustice is his line: it’s rather, our bad faith; <br>a speech about immigrants by one authority, <br>made only a day before<br>the figures of illegals published by another…<br>conspiracy against his community is his suspicion<br>(while his community just get on with it…) </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">extreme cynics who know their extremist radicals<br>deconstruct his subtext to be saying, <br>we’re only a poor community, but<br>we wire up terror like the best –<br>you have been warned..</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">and we, the tolerant and good-hearted, <br>forbear from that sharp riposte<br>which would have him foaming at the mike…<br>if you feel so badly picked upon, so disapprove<br>of your adopted country and its morals, <br>that you desire to meddle in its politics and laws –<br>then why not return to the country you were born in, <br>whose messy state, you and yours have failed to deal with…? <br>Of course, he can’t, because it’s just too dangerous…<br>Back hopme, they’re just him, but on the ‘other’ side…</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Oh perfidious Albion! Have you forgotten<br>your imperialist and sharply-ordered past? <br>The guilt of centuries lies heavy on thy heart –</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">well, at least as far back, as the Danish invasions<br>of massacre, rape and loot; the marauding Jutes before them, <br>the migrating Saxons before that; and the Roman soldiers, <br>law-givers and architects and builders, before them…? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Yes, it’s time for an Emotional Blackmail Studies<br>Department in the local Poly… there should be<br>no lack of smiling lecturers, to remind us<br>how fortunate you are, mate, to be educated…</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=460322" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I’m thinking of applying<br>for a lecturer’s post, myself…<br>wait til the appointments board<br>hear my personal cv of injustice done, <br>childhood without care or opportunity, <br>the bruises bravely borne…<br>a triumph of self-education out of the gutter…<br>and if they turn me down…<br>well, they know what’s coming to them…</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Michael+Shepherd">Michael Shepherd</a></strong></div>