How To Be Remembered

Shameful, but true.

 

How to be Remembered

A shameful commentary on this world

 

By Elton Camp

 

Please give his name without any wait

A decade ago, who governed your state

A person who was prominent as can be

Is quickly and easily forgotten you see

 

So that one’s name will live to all time

All it takes is to do some heinous crime

Charles Manson wouldn’t ring a bell

If hadn’t he followers to murder impel

 

Jim Jones would be a person obscure

Followers’ suicides made him endure

Sirhan Sirham we wouldn’t recognize

Without Bobby Kennedys’ bad surprise

 

Benedict Arnold would be forgotten

If he had not acted quite so rotten

Would Ivan the Terrible have stood

If, instead, he’d been Ivan the Good?

 

Adolph Hitler’s name to history lost

Had he not brought such awful cost

And Spiro Agnew we couldn’t recall

If the man had never resigned at all

 

Who would remember lawyer Dean

If with President Nixon wasn’t seen

John Wayne Gacy was only a fat clown

Until he brought so many boys down

 

So that one’s name won’t ever pass away,

Just pick some prominent person and slay

James Earl Ray wouldn’t mean a thing

Had he not killed Martin Luther King

 

John Wilkes Booth remembered not

Except that he, Abraham Lincoln shot

Mark Chapman nobody would know

Except for John Lennon’s fatal blow

 

This isn’t a way to fame to recommend

It is a terrible way for a person to end

But from such thing far greater note arises

Than if you had won many Nobel Prizes