The Angry Exile: Exaggerate? Us?

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

Tuesday 13 October 2009

Exaggerate? Us?

While these clowns with their green pieces are on the roof of the palace of Westminster it might be a good time to remind ourselves how Big Eco, of which their organisation is very much a part, likes to operate now and again.

Smoothly change from predicting and ice age to predicting warming shortly after a run of cold years gives way to some warm ones, and then sic lawyers on journos who manage to interview you and get you to admit it on film.

Duck questions you weren't expecting and don't like by answering a slightly different question that wasn't actually asked, which is an old political favourite of course, and not surprising from a former politician - if indeed 'former' is the right word. And then have his microphone switched off if he carries on trying to ask that inconvenient (see what I did there?) questions.

~~Make shit up.~~ Er, how can I put this? Ah yes, offer up scary scenarios using simplified and dramatic statements while not mentioning the uncertainties. Actually that sounds familiar. I'm sure someone said something like that once before... oh yes, it was Steven Schneider again. Clearly the principle has spread.

And in the meantime the BBC has suddenly woken up and noticed that global warming stopped more than ten years ago and that the climate scientists and their computer models - you know, that consensus that keeps going on that the science is in and it's settled - had no idea it was coming and can't explain it. And down under Australians are starting to seriously think about the N-word... no, it's not another racism row but nuclear power*. Is this where the paradigm shifts again, just as it did in the 70s when the scare went from global cooling to global warming? Are we going to return to the default position in science - that of caution and scepticism - or are we just going to start shitting ourselves about something completely new? In either case I hope environmentalism isn't too damaged. Yes, seriously. There are obvious environmental problems that we are able physically, technically and financially to fix, but one of my fears is that environmentalism will be the boy who cried wolf. I can just imagine a few years after the CO2 scare has blown over warnings of an avoidable habitat loss being waved away by a world that says 'yeah, sure, you told us that about the warming and the polar bears and we're not being fooled again'. If that were to happen it would not only be sad but arguably the worst offence of the whole AGW scare.

* I was once asked by an Aussie 'yeah, but would you want to live near a nuclear reactor?' I laughed and told him that the question should really have been would I want to live near a nuclear reactor again - where I last lived in the UK the nearest fission reactors were about half an hour away and there must have been ten or twelve more within another couple of hours drive.