Please Don't Mention Another Tension

WE DON’T give Modern Medicine the credit it deserves
For ridding us of all our ills and substituting Nerves.

I had some honest ailments once, some stomach, back and dental ones,
But now I’m told my only pains are masquerading mental ones.
My friendly sacroiliac, my folksy sinus earaches,
Though painful still, are nothing more than stifled guilt-and-fear aches.

Encouraged by an era of uncertainty and sin,
Neuroses — like the Communists — are boring from within.

Gone are the good old migraines that I got from being bilious.
Today’s physicians doctor them by looking supercilious,
And I am urged to ponder on the awful state that man is in,
Uncomforted by calomel, unaided by my Anacin.

Too bad I can’t turn back the clock and don a cloak and wimple
And live in some nice century when everything was simple.

For instance, take the pioneers. It’s plain their mental purity
Was due to living in a world where men had some security.
They knew just what the future held, the boys who built the nation:
Whoever wasn’t shot or scalped would die of slow starvation.

Faced with a flock of Indians out whooping on the slope,
You seldom heard the pioneers insist they couldn’t cope.

They whittled off infected arms, unplagued by Terramycin,
Enjoying pleasant, peaceful years that people’s nerves were nice in.
But me! I picked a troubled age, an age of change and shakedown,
And when I get a little time I plan to have a breakdown.