“Oh come with old Bachchoo
And leave the rest
The Captains and the Kings
With their promises, lest
They take you for a ride
And leave you in life’s byways,
Alone, unsatisfied.”
From The Bhajans of Bhogapur by Bachchoo

One of the most cynical applications of lyrical flexibility and transferred sentiment was the tribute of Elton John to Princess Diana who died in a car accident in Paris.
Years before Diana’s death, Elton wrote a tribute to Marilyn Monroe whom he addressed by her real name. The song opened with an admission: “Goodbye Norma Jean/Though I didn’t know you at all…” It celebrated her iconic incarnation as the sex symbol, the neurotic, suicidal darling of the Presidents and plebeians of America.
Did songsters block hit Elton when Diana died? Because instead of writing her a tribute of her own, he recycled the Marilyn Monroe song and shifted its lyrics about to characterise Diana as living her life “like a candle in the wind/Never knowing whom to turn to when the rain came in.”
The description may have been applicable in equal measure to both women and the precarious way they chose to live, but when I first heard the song I fancied I could hear in the background a distinct rumbling under the tomb of the Princess as she turned over to ask Elton why his appreciation of troubled women couldn’t have stretched to a fresh lyric and tune.
It was a Cambridge don who once remarked to me that he didn’t trust men whose surnames were really Christian names, such as Elton John, Mr X Stanley or Mr Y Charles! A silly prejudice, no doubt, because one of the heroes of my youth was a songster whose surname was Zimmerman, but who adopted the first name of the Welsh poet, calling himself Bob Dylan.
He came to prominence with his distinctive voice, which he lent to a world generation to voice what we thought was a new consciousness.
The political event that dominated the world in the years I was at university was the Vietnam War, imposed by American invasion on that peasant country in order, US foreign policy said, to prevent the countries of Asia falling like dominoes to the dominant winds of Communism. Now, 40 years later, with hindsight, the world looks very different and the US foreign policy of the time not just shortsighted but unimaginatively blind.
My generation, all apart from say Nixon’s kids, took the lyrics of Dylan’s famous song to be an attack on that foreign and military policy:
“…How many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they are forever banned?”
And
“How many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer my friend
Is blowing in the wind
The answer is blowing in the wind!”

Was it an address to the successive American Presidents — Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon — who waged that war? And was the wind that bore the answer the determinations of the younger generation?
The answers, my friend, are left to interpretation.
Yet the song came back yesterday to me and it was, in my mind, addressed to US President Barack Obama whom I caught on TV shedding tears at the funerals of the infant innocents and their teachers who were slaughtered by a young maniac in Connecticut.
How many deaths will it take till the US government modifies the gun laws to stop this repeated absurdity of a country that poses as a leader of our century? Is there no sense in the heads of the legislators of America? No shame in their hearts?
Yes, the world knows that the American Constitution’s Second Amendment allows their citizens to carry any unclassified weapon they choose, including military hardware. The amendment was framed in the days when the American colonies were fighting King George’s troops and, though the Constitution has acquired biblical
sanctity, it ought not to be preserved sanctimoniously. The amendment ought to be scrapped. There is no reason why a teenager should have access to a machine gun and its belts of ammunition.
As a boy I used to own a .177 bore air gun. Other boys, bigger and more licensed by their parents, owned .22 bore air guns. These could be used to shoot birds, to target the mangoes of unpopular neighbours so that the lead pellets would ruin part of their crop or to aim at the occasional bandicoot that made its way out of the sewers and invaded the yard.
The .177, though it was never used for such a purpose, could certainly act as a deterrent to any intruders who were not more heavily armed. I mean if they had a flamethrower or an anti-tank gun, the .177 wouldn’t warn them off.
It’s only in America among the nations of the West that military or heavy weapons can be acquired by the general public.
Strict enforcement won’t be easy but it can be done. And the question for President Obama is: “if not now, when?”
It would be taking on the gun lobby manned by maniacs like Charlton Heston who said the gun-ban supporters would have to prise the rifle from his cold, dead fingers. It would be taking on the multi-billion dollar arms industry.
The arms industry is huge and won’t be beggared by the ban on sales to the general public. As in other civilised countries the politicians must be able to persuade the electorate that a severe restriction on the circulation and ownership of weapons is the only way to keep
them out of the hands of maniacs.
The defence of these weapon-wielding inadequates is “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” which isn’t true. It’s mostly people with guns who kill people. A new equation, separating these elements, needs the articulation, force and strong arm of the law.
The answer this time is not blowing in the wind, it should be blowing from the voice of the White House, Senate and Congress.