| SLAUGHTER ON THE ICE (Shall we do it you and I?) Rolf Harris
Some ordinary man with a baseball bat stands over them and bashes in their heads.
They're babies,
Helpless babies.
Oh he's very, very careful as he slits from infant navel up to chin line. Least I imagine that's the method - I've never really watched the way a mother would.
Perhaps I should have done, then I could tell you every detail of the peeling of the skin and of the dumping of the smashed head, little naked, bleeding body, in an ever growing pile upon the ice . . .
Shall we intercept this killer and dispose of him together, you and I?
Would you let him say a word in his defence?
"It's a job" (it's a job!)
"It's a living" (that's a laugh!)
"In their natural environment - why half these little shavers wouldn't make it to adulthood,
I'm just merely helping nature keep the balance. If I didn't, someone else would."
"No good blaming me, man.
No one questions the Eskimos, been killing 'em for ages."
The Inuit, my friend - he was killing for survival. He didn't have a twenty thousand tonner to transport him. He hunted from a kayak with a quiet desperation and he used up every scraping of his kill.
The skin he wore to warm him and the sinew made his bow string and the bone was shaped for arrow head and fishing hook and bow.
The meat provided food for all the family's existence.
Then some designer comes along and says "That outfit looks so cute and we could sure create a fashion out o' him!"
So the caps and capes and coats and gloves and stoles and knee length boots are all promoted in the glossy magazines . . .
. . . And all the crappy little souvenirs that flood across the market - little seal with button-eyes and with a corkscrew up its grommet and no mention of the slaughter on the ice . . .
. . . P'raps a postcard of a bloody trail of naked little carcasses, lying there and rotting, isn't nice.
"Ah they never know what hits 'em, and I'll guarantee they're dead - well as near as makes no difference - honest . . . and we get 'em when they're babies 'cause they need the skins that colour, hey, the biggest laugh about it is, they stand and watch you coming - there's no sign of any danger there at all . . . and there's tons and tons of orders stretching months and months ahead!"
Shall we take this callous killer and dispose of him together, you and I?
Does no good to smash his head in, although that would please me muchly, but another ten would come to earn his wage.
No, the only way to do it is to shun the sealskin product, leave it lie and rot in warehouse and in factory and boutique. Maybe next year at this time, we can face the spring together, with a picture free of infant killing baseball batting b******s with the knowledge that the bottom's dropped right out of all this misery, and kids have got a prospect of a family of their own, in the years they have ahead.
Shall we do it, you and I?
World copyright - Rolf Harris March, l971
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