We’re the hollow men
THE poet TS Eliot wrote: “We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men… leaning together… our heads fill with straw.”
Very sombre, but aptly applicable to South African politicians, politics and enterprising business people, too. We have jobless, hopeless, hungry people, the worst over 60 analysed countries, many millions of suffering people, and our president merely blames the world’s economic downturn for our plight.
And perhaps, too easily, too shrewdly, the provincial perceived evil intentions of the West too that wants to “colonise” the whole world to milk the east, the south, all northern inhabitants and anything in between. This is immature rhetoric. The rest perceive themselves to be honest guys working for the wellbeing all of humanity? So I gather.
Yes, TS Eliot, your anguish was apt. Our heads are filled with straw. We are they. They are we. We, and they, that really are but ourselves, too, see other human beings, different to themselves, as inherently inclined to do us, or the other way round, severe harm. The we-people always bedded in goodness viewing the others as the real villains of life.
Yes, TS, the shades of heartlessness, soulnessness, engulf even our deepest cognitive and psychological perceptions, our instinctive cultural inclination to claim morality for ourselves and “morning paper” the other’s immorality. This way. Or that way.
We, locally, have corruption on a scale of greed that turns all easy presented opportunities to very base and selfish concern, and we have politicians gathering in Parliament to toe party lines that was pre-decided regardless of integral morality. Yes, TS, a moral response to the soul’s call to protest all cruelty and endless greed is exchangeable for unity and opportunism. That is the way the cookie crumbles. In the end it is always powerless, exasperated people who suffer. This way or that way. So that party loyalty can be projected to the outside world. There is job security involved, dummy. F*** the poor.
And the business guys watch. Watch whether they could risk investing more money to grow more money locally, or whether they should move their concerns to countries so desperate to survive that they would just bend over and become base prostitutes to survive at all cost. People bedded to one-dimensional existence, with capped souls, who are heartily inclined to add money on to more money, don’t care. They care about millions turning into billions, and the respectful blink that will appear in the eyes of those who have equally and successfully killed their questioning soul and their probing moral being. F*** the poor. Our real anthem. Really.
Yes, TS Eliot. “The horror. The horror. We are the hollow men.”