Yesterday I posted the “I’m mad as hell” speech from Network and said that the expressed sentiments of alienation and powerlessness were more topical today than when written in 1976. The same holds true of Edwin Brock’s poem Five Ways to Kill a Man. In 5 stanzas Brock outlines different ways of killing someone. Each is more advanced historically – Jesus’s crucifixion, the War of the Roses, WW1/gas; WW2/atomic bombs – and each is more deadly than the one before. Significantly each one also distances the killer more and more from the victim, until eventually in the final stanza there is no killer or victim, just existence in a world that requires the killing of humanity to survive, The key to survival in a world of increasing crime, social problems, pollution, destruction of environment, religious intolerance, suicide bombings and financial crises is to become desensitised to those things, to switch off. Like a sheet of corrugated iron turned over to reveal the nasties underneath, Brock decries that existence by revealing it. In its own way it is Howard Beale shouting "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore.”
