Somebody should have told you
That there was never any future
In lying supine,
Idly dreaming
Of your lost glory days
The vanished grandeur of your imperial passage
When you subdued the very waves
And subjugated the nations of the world
With boots pressing downturned faces
Further into the mud until they choked,
Striking accords and treaties
Then perfidiously reneging
Carrying cargo requiring whips and chains
A-looting and a-raping
Destroying and acquiring
Wholesale pillaging
But you know, all for their own good
A civilizing mission of course
Truth be told it was all a bit of a burden
But somebody had to do it and who better than us?
Quite quite but can you see the future
In dreaming of a past that was actually a nightmare
And how it poisons your present
Making your current decline
Take on the bouquet of a corpse
Your empire resulted in beaucoup bad karma
And a backlash that reverberates and echoes
Not only did you oppress and degrade the colonized
But we dehumanized ourselves in the process
Turns out that your manifest destiny
Was to be exceptional only in dissembled aggression
Yet you still wrap yourself in the flag
Butchers apron, a filthy bloody rag
While cultivating a loathsome air
Of detached superior nonchalance,
Fundamentally supercilious
Undermining any attempts at seriousness
With a deadly withering irony
A scornful reproach of all decency
Yet we are still surprised
When we encounter all the hate
Displayed by neighbours and others
Further a-field, all over in fact
Can’t they see what we did for them
All those ungrateful so and so’s
Can you believe that they think of us as some
Stricken beast too stupid to know that its dead?
Well we will show them one day
If only the enemy of the people
Those traitors and bleeding hearts
Would stop talking us down
If only we could rouse and wake up
Then we might dream
Of starting over again, though this time
We would make sure that the sun
Never ever never sets
