The Angry Exile: Toynbee is proof that there is no God...

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Saturday 28 March 2009

Toynbee is proof that there is no God...

... either that or he doesn't give a shit about hypocrisy. I can't come up with any other explanation why someone like Toynbee the hillbilly drag act is walking around rather than being two charred shoes in the centre of a smoking hole in the ground having been hit by a zillion volts of holy wrath. I'm sure this is going to get fisked to fuck by better than me, but I'm going to put my 2 cents in anyway. It starts with the title:

A furious public demands political anger management.
Little the government suggests begins to match our outrage at bonuses, fiddles and failures.

Political anger management? It's been Gordon Clown and his gang who've been stoking it up. The phrase you're looking for is anger encouragement. And talking of bonuses, fiddles and failures there's plenty of fucking outrage directed at the Westminster failures who are merrily creating their bonuses with expenses fiddles. People in glass houses, Polly. And on the subject of glass and houses let's not forget that you get six figures for writing whiny class hatred shit for a company that hates tax avoidance yet managed to swing a refund from the tax man despite a turnover of over £300 million. How's the Tuscan villa Pol? Are your windows alright? So much safer than Edinburgh when people are stirring up public anger against anyone paid too much for fuck all benefit, eh? You fucking despicable hypocrite.

When the law says nothing can be done, a hurled brick has an extra gust of public opinion behind it. ...his broken windows are an emblem ... a totem of a public mood.

Look, you stupid slag, how many times must it be written in how many places? The inept government fuckwits who bailed out RBS, with taxpayers' money don't forget, might have done something about it if their due diligence hadn't been so hopeless. It would kind of go like this: "Sir Fred, if we dig RBS out of the hole you put it in exactly how much do you leave with and from what sources and for what reasons? Ah, are these your pension arrangements? Sorry, that's not acceptable and must be altered or we'll simply let RBS go under instead." Of course, they should have let it go under anyway, but that's by the by. The point is Fred getting out with that nice juicy pension was, and please listen carefully here Polly, another fucking government failure. So having failed to stop the loathsome prick lining his pockets in a quite legal way, and having failed again to convince anyone that they'd be able to do anything about it after the event, the snot muncher and Harmperson et al were left with making the poor cunt the Two Minute Hate of the financial crisis. As I've said before, I want to dislike the man but the behaviour of senior Labour figures and ~~sycophants~~ sympathizers like you Polly, make it really hard not to take Fred's side, despicable twat though he may well be.

For all the fright talk, today's Put People First demonstration will be a respectable array of big charities, churches and unions, urged on by the Bishop of London.

Read: fake charities, some mouthpieces representing a largely out of fashion belief, and unions. The usual rentagobs in other words.

You don't have to be "anti-capitalist" to join the burst of public opinion against mountainous taxpayers' sums being sunk into bottomless banks that should have been nationalised.

What? What? Are you on something mind bending or did you just swallow the blue pill? The mountainous sums are being sunk into banks BECAUSE they're being fucking nationalized. And capitalists would not approve of it either.

The US is being tougher, prompted by headlines such as "Not so fast you greedy bastards" in the New York Post.

Ahem, I quote:"A furious public demands political anger management." Ring a bell? As I keep saying, the government and their tame journos, naming no names, are doing an admirable job at spin, shit stirring and keeping the designated decoy for public anger in the limelight while the snot muncher smirks and skulks.

Never mind apologies for the past, where are the new policies now? Labour should simply announce an emergency cap on top pay. Anything over the prime minister's £200,000 should be temporarily taxed at 90%. No bonuses, no fiddles. The golden geese will fly away to Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai? Unlikely, but if a few go, who cares?

Fuck's sake, I never earned anything like that much and I left the UK. Not to a tax exile admittedly, and they take the piss here too though it has other compensations. But if someone like me who never earned more than 40 grand will leave the country do you really think most of the megabucks mob will hesitate for a nanosecond? You might be happy to stay put and pay 90% over 200 grand, though I'm sure GMG's accountants could organize that for you if necessary, but why the fuck would anyone who's bright enough to make that much money stay and be raped in the wallet? You think maybe a few will go, but I'm telling you that only a few will stay and I bet nearly all will be people with the ear of senior NuLabs and/or people who write whiny shite on their behalf from Tuscany.

No one in the public sector should get more than £150,000: in the present mood, all wise public bodies should rapidly cut their own top pay, before vengeful mobs vote in the Tories to mince public services.

Fuck me, something I can vaguely agree with, though it's way too little and too late - the vengeful mobs are likely to vote in the mincing Tories (ha!) anyway, which really shouldn't thrill anyone because Cameron's idea of a cut in expenditure seems to be what everyone else apart from NuLab MPs and fucking thick mouthpieces would call a slightly smaller increase. The public sector needs to be cut but personally I have almost no hope that any likely leader from among the main three parties has the balls to do it before the whole fucking lot implodes anyway. Incidentally, I've more or less bet my future that Britain's public sector will implode first and that twenty million Aussies will simultaneously shit themselves and demand that Canberra do what's needed to avoid the same fate. It's my belief that watching the UK go over the edge will be the warning Australia needs to pull back from the brink in time.

You'll be in Tuscany when that happens I expect, won't you Pol? Or will you stay with your ideals and go down with the sinking ship? We can but hope, but why do you and those wankstains in Parliament have to take the rest of the country down too?

Class is back, in a new guise.

And how sweet that must be for you, you vindictive bitch. Tricky to spit your class war laden venom without any class. But of course it takes one to know one, and that's how you know them, right?

...government has to call time on pay for all, to end the greed game where every silverback demands to be in the top quartile. Despite a dab of penitential ash on its brow, the City still sees nothing much wrong with how things were. Wait for it to blow over, but for God's sake don't let the politicians ruin things with regulation!

They've ALREADY ruined things with regulation, you stupid fucking mutation. What do you think the FSA was? What do you think the SEC was? Or ASIC? Or the various regulators of every fucking financial market that went tits up, for they all fucking had at least one and sometimes two or three regulatory bodies. And that's not even counting the central banks. When will you lot wake up and realize that you can't blame the free market because THERE AREN'T ANY FREE MARKETS BECAUSE GOVERNMENTS WON'T PERMIT IT. This constant fucking anti market whine (which seems to come both from left and what gets called 'right' these days) is like a spoilt teenager whinging that Santa didn't bring them what they wanted when they're old enough to work out that Santa doesn't exist.

Despicable fucking hypocrite! Where are those fucking bolts of lightning when you need one?

H/T to Ambush Predator.