The Fletcher Memorial Home

Lyrics:

Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere
And build them a home, a little place of their own.
The Fletcher Memorial
Home for Incurable Tyrants and Kings.

And they can appear to themselves every day
On closed circuit T.V.
To make sure they're still real.
It's the only connection they feel.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Reagan and Haig,
Mr. Begin and friend, Mrs. Thatcher, and Paisly,
"Hello Maggie!"
Mr. Brezhnev and party.
"Scusi dov'è il bar?"
The ghost of McCarthy,
The memories of Nixon.
"Who's the bald chap?"
"Good-bye!"
And now, adding colour, a group of anonymous latin-
American meat packing glitterati.

Did they expect us to treat them with any respect?
They can polish their medals and sharpen their
Smiles, and amuse themselves playing games for awhile.
Boom boom, bang bang, lie down you're dead.

Safe in the permanent gaze of a cold glass eye
With their favorite toys
They'll be good girls and boys
In the Fletcher Memorial Home for colonial
Wasters of life and limb.

Is everyone in?
Are you having a nice time?
Now the final solution can be applied.

"The Fletcher Memorial Home" is a song written by Roger Waters, and performed by the English rock band Pink Floyd. The song appears on their twelfth studio album, The Final Cut (1983). It is the eighth track on the album and is arranged between "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert" and "Southampton Dock". The song is also featured on Pink Floyd's compilation albums Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd (2001)[3] and The Best of Pink Floyd: A Foot in the Door (2011).

History

The song is about Waters' frustration with the leadership of the world since the Second World War, mentioning many world leaders by name (Ronald Reagan, Alexander Haig, Menachem Begin, Margaret Thatcher, Ian Paisley, Leonid Brezhnev, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon), suggesting that these "colonial wasters of life and limb" be segregated into a specially-founded retirement home. It labels all the world leaders as "overgrown infants" and "incurable tyrants" and suggests they are incapable of understanding anything other than violence or their own faces on a television screen.

In its concluding lines, the narrator of the song gathers all of the "tyrants" inside the Fletcher Memorial Home and imagines applying "the Final Solution" to them.

Fletcher in the name of the song is in honour and remembrance of Roger Waters' father, Eric Fletcher Waters, who was killed during the Second World War in Anzio, Italy.

The Fletcher Memorial Home scenes in The Final Cut film were filmed at the manor house Forty Hall in Enfield, north London.

Critical reception

In a review for The Final Cut, Patrick Schabe of PopMatters described "The Fletcher Memorial Home" as "majestic, but clunky". Critic Mike Cormack calls it "one of the most arresting tracks on The Final Cut, chilling in its demand for lethal restitution, but clear-eyed about the atrocities inflicted by world leaders."