Uche’s posthaven

A colleague of mine today took a break from cleaning Ike debris out of his yard (and he's in Columbus Ohio FFS!) and IMed "Wow did you hear about Lehman?" I reflexively replied "O yeah. He dead. A penny for the Old Guy." It immediately struck me how apt The Hollow Men is for Wall Street today. Never one of my favorite poems (T.S. Eliot played self-righteous prig with so much better effect in The Wasteland) it does sometimes ring truer than true.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Or for 'nuff American families, I guess, their neighbor's dry cellar where they crash in foreclosure Hoovervilles. Or I guess that's Bushvilles, this time.

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Throw in "back without bone, scout with glaucoma" and you have our purblind referee crew of financial regulators.

[Snippety-snip]

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

In other words the desert realm of a lame duck president, and dare we hope the fading is of the false Bethlehem of trickle-down economics?

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

Actually, I think it's worse in Zimbabwe, mirabile dictu. But we're doing what we can to keep up.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

Yes, the absence is of stewardship in government. Dare we hope the dying stars are lobbyists?

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

OK, OK, it's really not easy for me to bear up such plaintive nonsense, even to serve goring supply-siders. Cheer up mate, life does go on.

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

And see, there goes that T.S. Eliot again, jumping the shark a century before anyone else knew what that meant.  Come on, Old Possum; give me something I can work with.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

And there is why you can only roll your eyes at the master for so long. After that little bit of silliness, one of the most cutting passages in the entire piece.  Oh this is enough of a draught of bile to warm the resentments back up again.

The object that blocks the light, birthing the shadow of inaction is, of course, venality.

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

And it is under those who most loudly, most furiously declare their pieties, and who claim to be defenders of creation that this shadow grows. Right to life apparently does not mean right to good life, to just life.

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

Thus the Contract with America. Empty promises are no match for venality.

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

LHC is never going to end the world, of course, and neither will LEH.  I've spent most of this piece railing against government, but let us not forget the clients of our government. The greedy, orgulous, myopic cohort to whom we entrust our life savings. The ones whose whimpering you now hear from the direction of New York. The Guys who were madly dancing and whooping it up as they left a trail of gunpowder throughout the foundations of our parliaments (of fowls and capons). The ones who are now no more than lifeless effigies for us to burn, if we can afford the fuel to light up. The Old Guys. I haven't even a penny for the Old Guys.