I can't wait for the phone calls to stop! I hear that the Koch brothers are behind the incessant robo-calls. The Koch brothers and every other super pac . . .
Waiting for the Barbarians
C.P. Cavafy
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
4 comments:
Nin, this is just to say thanks for your courage, humor and against-the-grain persistence in sticking up for the good and real things, there in the middle of the maelstrom of insanity.
Shine, perishing republic...
And meanwhile, just so that you do not feel neglected for an instant, there is a message awaiting you even at this moment, brought to you by the happiness brothers -- and it comes in the form of a question:
Are you having fun yet?
If the answer is No, just keep in mind that You'd be happy too if you were a billionaire who knew from experience that dark money can work in destroying the environment and the democracy and making you more billions, clap clap for dark money hooray!
So have a jellybean, my dear, while you wait with baited breath for your brain to be eaten by that next nuisance phone call from the million-robot army!!
So ready for Wednesday . . . and yet so very anxious.
the barbarians...frightening...everyone
Everyone, that is, but the Devil.
He says, Come unto me, my people.
And the barbarians just jump into the car and come. But of course, being godfearing, they stop first to pick up something at Safeway, probably a bag of those delicious super-glycose carbon-enriched jellybeans the K Brothers favor.
Took ten steps outside my house into the onrushing traffic haze of the freeway feeder this morning, got as far as the corner where I was mown down seven months ago, learned that last night a large adult deer was killed by a car at that same spot.
No one is ever cited for hitting something living there.
The K Brothers however let no automotive excess go unrewarded. The case of jellyeans is already in the mail.
So... have a nice day!
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