Free Speech - It's Only Words, and Words are not enough...

At first they came for the white-boy shock rapper
and i did not speak up
because I hated rap
thought he was crap
and only brain-dead kids liked his music

besides, why didn't he just go R & B?

I didn't cringe, or shudder
when middle-aged
'pillars of the community'
said that they "believed in free speech
but a line had to be drawn somewhere!"
I knew where they were coming from
frankly, I agreed.

in any case, hopefully they could eliminate
other such foul music trends
like death metal, punk, techno, art rock
and all those protest singers
who had failed to recognise
that the sixties are over, MAN!

MOR, classical and opera would rain supreme

when they threw some Abo in gaol
because he lit a fire in the CBD
I didn't care either
that inconsiderate black bastard
had ruined the day of thousands of shoppers
with his stupid fucking peace fire,
it's prehistoric smoke
polluting the pristine environment of Myer

didn't he know you had to have money
to do things like that,
that pollution is the province of wealth creators?
I mean, if he was dumping toxic waste,
or mining uranium
and getting groundwater from an ancient aquifer
for free,
in the driest state, in the driest country in the world,
it would have been no questions asked.
If he was doing this and employing
a few thousand people
then that would have been okay
but the only people he was employing
was the local constabulary

When the Australian media did a job on the protesters
illustrating the virtues of well-funded editing suites,
the creative writing skills of numerous journalists
and the power of wide-scale distribution,
I laughed and turned to James and said:
"What are they talking about, 'free speech'?
Speech isn't free, you have to pay for it,
or own a media empire, just like you and me."