They couldn't kill Harry Patch

The Radiohead have brought down the hammer, arching it like a rainbow, slamming it hard against my hibernating torpor. Of course, they hadn't planned on knocking the summer doldrums out of my cobwebbed melon, but it was a secondary effect nevertheless. Their purpose was to write a song, a ballad, which commemorated the life of the last British veteran of World War I. The first European world war is the most upsetting of the two when you look at it. Bloated and ignorant empires, overreaching their hands, caught between the old world of aristocratic politics of honour, and the new world of bourgeoisie liberal capitalism. In any case, the great men on both sides of the aristocrat/bourgeoisie divide saw no choice but to settle their differences over great swaths of the globe's territory, using that immortal, alas deeply mortal, currency of human life. Everyone knows, or at least has a sense, of how these old guys saw things; Hindenburg or Churchill, each leader saw himself as overlord of a great human conflagration, it would only take several hundred thousands dead, several millions dead, and the world would be set aright. "For the homeland lads! Whichever your homeland may be!"

Radiohead, that British band who - love them, hate them, shrug them - do not posture themselves to the interests of market trends, yet marketers will study them for generations, asking, "how'd they do it?" Though there is virtually no end to the quantity of bands struggling for relevance, Radiohead has been from the start the sort of band which looks away from the cameras, turns around when they appear. For all Radiohead's great fame and unique stature as that one band whose members have waned into years of life by definition uncool, they still manage to exude an importance even a vitality. Though they are indeed a hugely popular band, even the most cutting-edged musical tastes are not so jaded with the concept of "pop" not to appreciate the singular path Radiohead has made for itself.

Everyone dies, just so you know, and it's foolishness and romanticism to hold the deaths of some as being of more significance than the deaths of others. Nobody's fault to have lived; nobody's fault to have died, it just is. Yet I can't help feeling a little sad about the death of Harry Patch. I love the idea that the violence and madness of that first European war could not kill him, and despite his acquaintance with the hell and hopelessness of such unrelenting mechanical barbarism, he continued on through the decades and centuries; nothing could kill him! Like a wise tortoise who's seen the beginning, and the end, and the beginning again, Harry shuffled off to sleep beneath an ancient fern, its overhanging fronds shade him from the sun, deflect the bullets and chemical poisons meant to kill him. I'm grateful to Harry Patch for living through the madness, and to Radiohead for capturing the sadness and injustice of humanity's unremitting plague of male violence.