The Angry Exile: Never was so much owed by so many for so little

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

Thursday, 14 July 2011

Never was so much owed by so many for so little

Click for linky

The Treasury will publish full accounts for all Whitehall departments to give taxpayers an idea of what the public finances would look like if it was a company.
The move will for the first time bring into one place the future liabilities of accrued pension liabilities for public sector workers and the future costs of schools and hospitals built using the private finance initiative.

Not before time. All this off book stuff has been hiding the true cost of the profligacy of recent British governments (including the current one) for way too long.

Experts suggest that this will add an estimated £1,200billion from debt in the accounts of 1,500 public bodies to the Government’s books.
Adding in the official national debt figure of £909billion, it takes the overall total debt bill to more than £2,000 billion, as at the end of 2009/10.

And that's not the highest estimate I've ever heard. I'm sure the old Burning Our Money blog gave higher estimates of the real debt now and then, but let's assume that £2,000 billion, or two trillion if you prefer, covers it all. How much is that in meaningful terms?

Well, this sort of thing has been done before of course, but since that picture has a bit of cash in it I thought it'd be interesting in a random kind of way to start from there. In it I can see a couple of tenners, a couple of twenties and 22 £1 coins. If you were to throw away that £82 and follow it up by throwing away another £82 a minute later and so on and so on then in 24 hours you'd have thrown away just over a hundred grand - £118,080 to be precise - and if you kept it up for a year you'd have chucked just over £43 million. But if you started a little while ago, actually just over two thousand years ago at midnight on New Year's Day, year Zero AD, then by now you'd have thrown away only - hah, only - £86 billion and some change. Change in this case meaning £730,232,238. Clearly a long way to go to equal the UK's debt by chucking away money at that same rate of £82 per minute - and let's be honest if we saw someone chucking away eighty quid every sixty seconds we'd think he was an idiot. Starting from 0AD again, from today you'd have to keep going for another 44,373 years. Worse still, you wouldn't finish until halfway through October.

Now that's a very simple calculation and doesn't allow for such things as meal breaks, sleep, days off, sick leave, holiday time and dropping dead with well over 460 centuries to go, so you might be thinking of sharing the workload a bit. If you enlisted the help of ninety nine other people and covered for each other to allow for breaks and a bit of sex - probably quite good sex if you've ever fancied doing it on a huge pile of money - to breed replacement money wasters you could get it done in just a few generations. But of course there's an even faster way to do it which involves almost no effort at all.

Give the job to a government.