Purge pagan books from library shelves.
Heave heathen texts from the schools.
Prevent perversion, kids bound for hell
having been Socrates’d by Satan’s tools
force-feeding our nation corrupt education,
regaling children with tales of false deities
prodding them down the path to perdition
filling young minds with ambiguities.
Burn all the books of ancient philosophers.
Out, high thee hence. Go away, Aristotle,
quick, put betwixt us miles and kilometers.
I swear, though dead, if not we will throttle you.
Protect the kiddies from ancient playwrongs,
lest they question the Gospel or Bible.
The idea that gods, though false, do wrong,
could, we’re afraid, make young minds pliable.
Dorothy Parker (after a drink?),
said, “If led to culture, some learn to think.”*
———————————— *Actually, it was “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” Put my misuse down to poetic licentiousness. Also, full disclosure, I have no knowledge that Dottie was drinking when she said it, but I conjecture she said it at Algonquin Round Table, so it would be, I'll warrant, a safe-ish assumption.
