By Eric Paine
Paine: Hello Burkie, it’s a long time since we last met on planet earth, how have you been getting on in purgatory?
Burke: Well bless my soul, it’s old Paine from cloud nine. They are not letting me out from purgatory yet, I got a special pass out for this meeting of earthies celebrating my bicentenary. Up here it only seems like yesterday that you were doing your best to change the tried and tested old order.
P: Sorry if I’m a bit late but all these new methods of communicating through the atmosphere seem to be effecting my wings. Before we start going over old times I must say it’s a completely different world down there to what it was in our day. Aeroplanes darting about all over the earth, motor cars and tractors making horses redundant, and how I would have relished using their instant E-mail instead of scribbling away millions of words with a quill and waiting ages for an answer. Down there they seem to be in a similar turmoil regarding social change as when our controversy raged in the 18th century.
B: I don’t think I would want to go back there now; latest reports from new arrivals up here say they are no happier. I still maintain it was a great pity you had the audacity to produce that cursed book, Rights of Man in reply to my Reflections on the Revolution in France. History repeated itself with revolutions in Russia, China and elsewhere with little or nothing learned from the French revolution, or any other bloody or so-called democratic revolution. Allow power to the masses and sooner or later a dominant elite emerges producing anarchy, sometimes terror and general chaos. In the end the vast majority end up far worse than before they started disturbing time-honoured rule by kings, aristocrats and bishops. I vividly remember saying in a speech in the House of Commons as I threw my sword on the floor, ‘this is what we get from an alliance with France, nothing but PAINE, PAINE, PAINE!’
P: Oh, dear, you have not changed a bit and it looks like you never will get into the highest celestial spheres. A fat lot of good it did you clinging to the Catholic faith. I got rid of all denominational baggage and I reckon I did far more good in the world than you ever did. You will never meet up with such enlightened souls as Socrates, Bruno and Gandhi as I have.
B: Didn’t they see through you?
P: Very funny, but you did serve a purpose because had you not written Reflections I might never have written Rights of Man, which sold far more copies than your book. Equal rights for all had to be spelt out and that the old order of oppression of the poor by monarchies, aristocracy and the church had to be overturned everywhere. True, the results to date have been rather patchy and in many parts of the world there is still a long way to go, but my ideas for free education, democracy, embryo social security and many other things way ahead of our time eventually came to pass in more advanced countries. That book became the bible of the poor and it sold a million and a half copies before I got called up. Did you ever go to prison for your principles as I did and was nearly executed in Paris?
B: You were always good at blowing your own trumpet.
P: You prospered on earth as a paid hack whereas I gave away most of my earnings to the causes of freedom, or others made money out of my works. And look where it got you in terms of eternity. How ever did you manage to sleep at night after wriggling out of paying back that loan you used to purchase your estate? And you were paid a huge pension by George III.
B: That is none of your business – and why have they not put up a statue in the House of Commons to you like they have for me?
P: That is no honour as you were a party to protecting their vested interests. I always said principles before parties otherwise parties rule principles and I reckon I have lived up to that. You completely ignored the causes of the French Revolution; the exploitation of the poor for many centuries by rulers with inherited rights and privileges even more so than in Britain and god knows that was bad enough. You were utterly heedless of the profligacy of the court and the duplicity of the church. You kept the profit from the sale of your book, whereas I received a prosecution for Rights of Man and was outlawed from Britain. I don’t suppose you ever read Tom Erskine’s defence of me.
B: Your ego is as big as ever and I do not know how I put up with you when you came to stay with us for a few days after American independence. You were always too acerbic, dogmatic and a rabble rousing zealot. You took away the peoples faith in the bible and the church, which has always been a great source of comfort and consolation. You fostered hatred and discontent causing many innocent people to cross over early. Earthies are just incapable of living together harmoniously when they are given silly notions about their rights, which you implanted. Duties before rights I say and you get less fights. Have you noticed they put up a statue to me in Washington and not one to you?
P: I had noticed that and appropriately you are doing a sort of Hitler salute. Have you heard the common saying: ‘you silly old Burke’, or, ‘you Burke’? I always said rights should be united with the idea of duties; rights become duties by reciprocity. Monuments don’t mean that much, but I confess I am chuffed that there are monuments to me in Thetford, New Rochelle, Paris, Morristown, Leicester, Lewes, Alford and now London for the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the publication of Rights of Man. There are probably more, but I don’t go around looking for them. I hear they are to put up a statue of me in Bordentown, where I was happiest in America. But let us not go into toting up these memorials, it’s better that people concentrate upon living up to my example. I was not perfect, whoever is?
B: Well I have toted up the memorials world-wide and I come out well on top! P: That is probably because you were buried in Westminster Abbey was it, and gullible people thought you were automatically entitled to be honoured elsewhere? Silly old William Cobbett dug my bones up ten years after I had crossed over and took them to England with the intention of building a mausoleum in my honour and giving me a decent burial, but he never got around to it and so, like Moses, I have no earthly sepulchre.
B: Thank goodness for that. The less people know about you the better. Encouraging people to get ideas above their stations only leads to the democratic bog with everybody claiming equal rights when it’s not practical. If everybody is somebody then nobody is anybody!!
P: You old hornwogler, and I could say much worse. If mankind had clung to your sort of philosophy, dogmas and creeds they would never have got to the moon in 1969. I had ideas about bridges, including one across the English Channel, but never thought it would be possible to go to the moon as earthies now have. It’s likely they will be landing on Mars and other planets soon. Kings, nobles, or as I have called them, NO-ABILITIES, popes and bishops would never have allowed it. They wanted to hold people down in metu perpetuo (constant fear, in case you have forgotten your Latin). Fancy Apollo going all that way in a few days and Armstrong being able to wonder at the infinite greatness of the creator, which is all a bit old hat to us now. Compare that with the months I spent crossing the Atlantic in a sailing boat. Five times I did it. By the way, I doubt if earthies will ever be able to stop Neptune over there colliding with Uranus every 117 years. You could say that I and those who followed my lead opened up new vistas for humanity, whilst you were only concerned to toady to the status quo and stifle progress. For my pains, after my death I was initially falsely portrayed as a devil-shaped shuttlecock, tossed between fanatical and infidel rackets.
B: There you go again, soaring off into flights of fancy, kidding yourself you are a stupor mundi (wonder of the world). You bring on analysis paralysis. I think it is very wrong for earthies to be spending all that money on space exploration when they have so many better things they could be doing. They want to clean up on pollution down there before they start messing about on other planets.
P: For once we agree. Earthies must give that a much higher priority. If they are not careful they will completely mess up the whole ecosystem and they should immediately stop playing around with those dreadful nuclear weapons. I claimed to be a citizen of the world and the United Nations, who have honoured me, have much to do if their world is to survive another fifty years.
B: But you must remember the real is rational and the rational is real.
P: Burkie, what a truly nebulous statement.
B: It’s no use arguing with you. I am off to have a quick look at the test match. History might have been very different if in 1789 the first overseas cricket team had not stopped at Dover because of the bloody revolution. Thoughts of leg breaks and cover drives might have stopped the revolution but would they have accepted the umpire’s word on leg before wicket and run outs?
P: So now you are blaming the terror on me for not teaching them cricket. I think it is time we declared, so up and away before you get another spell on earth at the bottom of the pile this time.
B: You can’t go on playing god forever. Remember that I said the wisdom of the dead was capable of guiding the living. Goodbye you old Oxymoron, I’ll keep working to get you sent down.
P: Nonsense! As I said: ‘The rights of the living are beyond being constrained by the rights of the dead’. You are as stubborn as a mule. Humans are all made in the same mould; it’s just that some are mouldier than others. Goodbye and keep seeking the lumen gratiae (light of grace).