the aftermath of war

 I've read these lyrics before, but they are better than I remembered them.  Well done Beagles.  I'd kind of forgotten about that part of your life.  Five prisoners, I'm guessing about ten thousand GI's in Germany, what were the odds?

What exactly were your duties?  Did you stand outside his door like one of the guards in the comic strips?  Did you lead him to breakfast and the garden?  I am sure you never spoke to him, but you must have looked at each other.  How did you feel about it?  On the one hand here is this very bad man, on the other hand he is a man just like you.  He was once part of this terrible machine, but now he is powerless.

V E day was early in May 1945, I was a couple months old.  But it seemed like the war was still going on when I was a small child.  Its shadow went on for years.  There was still talk of ration stamps, victory gardens, little monuments in the neighborhood, my dad and the other men sitting together while the women washed the dishes and the kids played underfoot, smoking cigars and talking about the war.  What had caused Hitler's downfall?  Invading Russia, they all agreed and tapped the ashes into the trays.  That seemed like important information, the wisdom of the elders.  

I remember Albert Speer from some tv show.  I guess the myth of the reluctant Nazi was still extant.  It portrayed a young Albert who just wanted to build big buildings but got sucked into the Nazi machine.  There is a scene where he is pinning on a Nazi armband and looking at himself in the mirror.  Pretty sharp, his smile seems to say.

We all build our own prisons sounds a lot like My friends in the prison they say unto me, How good, how good, it must feel to be free, and I answer them most mysteriously Are the birds still free from the chains of the skyway?

But I don't know about that analogy.  Seems like one thing to build your own prison, but a quite different thing to be in a prison, and if you are in a prison are you not building your own prison in prison, and isn't that twice as bad?  

Well we artists, we are entitled to fudge a little bit to give the workaday man the jolt that he requires to free him from the prison of his 9 to 5 world. I say most mysteriously.