POZZO: His hat!
[VLADIMIR seizes LUCKY’s hat. Silence of LUCKY. He falls. Silence. Panting of victors.]
ESTRAGON: Avenged!
[VLADIMIR examines the hat, peers inside it.]
POZZO; Give me that!
[He snatches the hat from VLADIMIR, throws it on the ground, tramples on it.]
There’s an end to his thinking!
VLADIMIR; But will he be able to walk?
POZZO; Walk or crawl! [He kicks LUCKY.] Up pig!
ESTRAGON; Perhaps he’s dead.
VLADIMIR; You’ll kill him.
POZZO; Up scum! [He jerks the rope.] Help me!
VALDIMIR; How?
POZZO; Raise him up!
And so on. Brilliant Beckett! I can’t help thinking that St Samuel was keeping a close eye on the politicians of his day.
LUCKY, in his current incarnation being Greece with the rope around its neck and Frau Merkel has been enlisted to play the role of POZZO. And our own Pinky Dave Cameron is shouting obscenities from the sidelines even as his erstwhile buddy LOL Rebekah is expressing her outrage that the CPS has had the temerity to actually charge her with an offence. It can’t get any better, I mean funnier. If this goes on the so-called comedians will be out of a job. Why do we need to pay for comedy when the politicians are doing such a good job of it. And the icing on the cake is that they are not intentionally funny. Of course , if they tried to be funny, they would fail utterly.
This must be why autocrats are so hard on anybody who makes fun of them because they must know, deep down, that they really are buffoons. It’s only themselves that cannot see the garish clown make-up on their bloated faces.
‘On the following day I sat alone till tea time in the bar restaurant of the Crown Hotel. The rattle of crockery in the kitchen had long since subsided; in the grandfather clock, with its rising and setting sun and a moon that appears at night, the cogwheels gripped, the pendulum swung from side to side, and the big hand, bit by bit, in tiny jerks, went its round. For some time I had been feeling a sense of eternal peace when, leafing through the Independent on Sunday, I came across an article that was related to the Balkan pictures I had seen in the Reading Room the previous evening. The article, which was about the so-called cleansing operations carried out in Bosnia, by the Croats together with the Austrians and Germans, began by describing a photograph taken as a souvenir by men of the Croatian Ustasha, in which fellow militiamen in the best of spirits, some of them striking heroic poses, are sawing off the head of a Serb named Branco Jungic.’ (Page 96 W G Sebald, The Rings of Saturn).
Yes, sometimes the politicians get seriously out of hand. Though the perpetrators in the Independent’s text appear to be still caught up in the belief that they are part of some sort of theatrical comedy.