“Where’s the door?”, I hear you asking. “Sorry”, I say, “you can’t see it yet”. When you ascend to heaven, it’s only at the very end that you get to the door. Today Benazir Bhutto was laid to her grave and this is the Song of the Day as it must be. I am sorry, I have no other image, this one and your fantasy must do.
I have never met Mrs Bhutto, I know that many things have been brought up against her, and still: she was a light in the dark, an incarnation of hope for a nation that is torn like hardly any other, and now she is dead, and at the same time nothing else counts any more. Whatever the past was, this is a woman who knew exactly about the danger she was in, a woman who braved the armies of madness … and fell. A woman who will be remembered, a woman who will be sung about. May her soul rest in peace, may her spirit be with this country, may her death have not been in vain.
And may the 20 who went with her neither be forgotten, as well as the 140 that went before. Let Democracy live, even when her proponents must die.
The Song of the Day is Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, and on such a day nothing but the pathos of the original will do.