A Poem by My Cousin

The world is full of mass-produced crap
Made by a Jap
Listening to American rap
Wearing a baseball cap.

My cousin came out with this one day while we were playing each other at Striker!, a soccer-themed computer game. He was going through a phase where he was coming out with lots of impromptu little pieces of doggerel like this. (He was in a band at the time.) Most of them were forgettable, but this one has stuck in my memory. (This one, and a rather pointless couplet: "I knew a girl so sweet and tender/you'd never guess she was a gender bender"). This was at least fifteen years ago.

I find this little quatrain quite profound and haunting, actually. I don't think I've ever read or heard such a powerfully epigrammatic description of a globalized, consumerist world.

(I generally avoid using the c-word that occurs in the first line, as I dislike all scatalogical words, but it can't be avoided here.)