The fallen and the new masters of the realm

IT was said of him who crashed out in the power game that he lacked the grip and the necessary effulgence of an articulated leadership. It was said of him that he was an helpless child of fortune frozen in infantile uncertainties. In a thousand diatribes after his fall, in scudding drips and dash of venom, he is coated in unbelievable buffoonery and vast immoral largeness.

Everywhere, in the dark passages and in the open alleys, the vanquished looks gaunt and shallow, swaddled in dirt and greed, painted in distrust and moral larceny, orphaned by those who once served the moment but are now screamingly hoarse and muted by the present riot and bluster of the new masters of the realm.

Alone in moments of despair and self damnation, he will remember the endless parade of little men without learning or any brightening lustre but much practised in crude dubiosity who bled him dry and ultimately hurried his fall.

Indeed, the wheel of fortune has turned in sordid circle. Everywhere the land is swept in vivid venom about the last order. Here nothing redeemable is perceived. Here nothing is cited even in some stingy acknowledgement of a possible corner of a salutary attainment.
No sir.

He is now like the dead without a voice. He is like the dark averted gaze, the shame unshared, the guilt and the terrible scourge worn alone, incessantly bayed by those who hold the new truth.

The glitter is gone. The fake ardour of old has yielded to infantile pouting and dismissive contempt. The luxuriant majesty of yesterday that once attracted dubious soothsayers and mercenary courtiers has faded into the dust and perished in forgotten emblems.

The fallen now stands alone in some bewildered solitary chasm, wrestling with aborted glory, stunned in some impenetrable musings about the road not taken, the clarity not perceived, the shepherding truth not heeded and the vast array of mendacity that swallowed his path.

Alone in moments of despair and self damnation, he will remember the endless parade of little men without learning or any brightening lustre but much practised in crude dubiosity who bled him dry and ultimately hurried his fall.

But should he be honest in such musings and personal pains, should he be true to himself and his God, he cannot now transfer every fault to the endless prattle of the
courtiers that enveloped his purpose. He must embrace the poignant reality of his own significant inadequacies. He failed in the large designs.

He was thrust into power by a blind caprice of fortune which neither strengthened his scholarship nor deepened the fecundity of his thoughts. He was often a vacant space without defined presence. He was a drunkenly leaning ambiance without signification. He was in power in nominal truth without the profundity of a substantiated gravitas. He would be more appropriately defined in the Tennysonian similitude: “The King a shadow, the City real.”

He remains now a cautionary tale to those who presently swagger and radiate in the sun. The truth be told: We are all appareled in ephemeral latitude. The shifting rhythms of power, the lustrous presence, the seeming magnificence and shining monarchical air must inevitably give way. What endure invariably are the veritable conscionable attainments, the selfless sacrifice, the self- denying patriotic vision that articulates power far beyond the narrow personal province, the enlightened resolve that accommodates the truth in pluralistic association.

The fallen now stands alone in some bewildered solitary chasm, wrestling with aborted glory, stunned in some impenetrable musings about the road not taken, the clarity not perceived, the shepherding truth not heeded and the vast array of mendacity that swallowed his path

But even now in the dizzying glow of the moment, you can see history in repetitive intimations. You can see the hubris and the contempt of power that is oblivious of its own transient stretch. You can see the sweeping disdain for the truth, the self-apportioned air of omniscience, the crazed all-knowing infallible swagger, the blusterous lunacy that insists that all the ills in the land are still inherited from the fallen one.

You can also see the blatant cudgeling of the residual emblems of pluralistic democracy and the crude gravitation to a primitive unitary state. Amid all these screaming aberrations is the largely unspoken caution and mediatory vision of those who ought to speak the truth to power but now openly abandon their role while they scribble odious panegyrics to the new gods.

And as for the people beguiled and swindled by the change mantra, they see the silently like the Roman mob, gradual in their rage, now lost and confounded, hurtling here and there, seemingly hopeless but never helpless before the unplanned but the inevitable eructation.
Nothing is learnt. We are detained still in a grim lock of episodic ferment.