The Angry Exile: We didn't know...

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

Sunday 6 February 2011

We didn't know...

... and we're still not being told. Thanks to a link from an anonymous commenter on my brief blog yesterday about the anti-government protests in Egypt and elsewhere I have now seen what we've not been shown (more videos here). I rarely do content warnings - in fact I can only recall doing so once for a clip where a repeatedly tasered aboriginal man spent several minutes screaming - but these certainly warrant it. What they contain is nothing less than attempted, if not outright, murder of protestors, allegedly by government forces.

Watch for the fire engine at about 0:18.

And the green van, possibly a police vehicle, at 0:40

And the long white vehicle at about 0:26

Now I'm sure that if that sort of treatment was meted out to Egyptian people regularly we'd have heard and it probably wouldn't be the kind of place people go on honeymoon, but the fact that it's happening even as an extreme reaction to the pressure on Mubarak's regime is an indication both of the utter contempt that their government has for ordinary Egyptians and the seething anger and unstoppable rage that has long been bottled up among them, and which has now been released. The Egyptians are mad as hell, and I had no idea. We didn't know, we weren't told.

And perhaps this is why we don't see change in the west and why we end up bitching that one party is much like another, and that they're all a bunch of bastards. We libertarian leaning types go further and call them authoritarian and untrustworthy, seeing almost everything they do as a reason for severely limiting the power of government over the law abiding individual. We despair that others can't see or won't look at the various examples of 'mission creep' legislation with laudable aims but the potential to be turned against the citizens its supposed to benefit, or even the cases where governments have in fact done precisely that. We rage that police arrest teenagers for committing photography in a public place despite the fact that the police have been repeatedly warned that this is not an offence. We rage that so many politicians are still wanton with our money except, it appears, when it comes to using it for their personal gain. We rage and rage and nothing changes, and we wonder why. Even when an election consists of an unpopular government meeting an inept opposition, and everybody knows that the government will probably change but in real life it won't feel like it, and we wonder why millions voted for the same cretins, venal nest-featherers, placemen, career politicos, liars, philanderers, cheats and assorted slime in the knowledge that the new lot would be much the same as the old lot (or perhaps the delusion that they wouldn't be). Why, for Christ's sake? WHY?

Perhaps the answer is in Egypt: quite simply, we're not yet being shot at and mercilessly run over when we complain, and until the day comes that we are most of us are happy to settle for more of the low grade contempt and mistreatment that we're used to. The Egyptians themselves tolerated what they had to put up with for longer than I've been alive - it took decades before they finally said 'Enough!'

I'm depressing myself here but I wonder if this inclination to tolerate things, to put up with our lot even when some bastard is deliberately making it worse, is some kind of human condition. We English with our 'Mustn't grumble' culture are our own worst enemies but looking at the news now it seems like we're anything but unique. How long did the Russians put up with the Tsars, and then how long did they put up with Communist rule? How long are the North Koreans going to put up with their Favourable Adjective Leader's misrule? Is it in our nature to leave things so long that they get so bad? Is the only shortcut ruinous war, either victorious as with the American colonists almost 230 years ago or with catastrophic defeat as with the Axis powers in WWII, and in either case with the mistakes of the past eventually repeated anyway? Is it really that or a few generations of things getting worse and worse until finally one or two lucky generations break the pattern for a while before the whole shitty cycle starts all over again?

To be blunt, can we look at Egypt and the other nations where the people have finally had it up to here with the leaders, and can we decide that at the next opportunity we'll reverse our own gradual slide toward the same situation? You know, before it reaches the bloodshed and violence that our media seem less than keen on showing us. Before our great-grandchildren are being rammed off the slidewalks by police hovervans, and while those of us alive today can feel the benefit of it. Because if we can't look and learn from this we really are in trouble. We didn't know and we weren't told, but we bloody well know now and so we're running out of excuses.