A Fool and a Knave

I believe we have the Financial Times to thank for the image to my left, forwarded me by a friend earlier today. Of course - as more than one cornered and humiliated weasel of a banker has bleated before a Commons Select Committee of late - no single individual could and should bear the entire blame for the blazing catastrophe we're all currently living through. Sadly, more of us have helped to stoke the fires in our own meagre fashion than we'd like to think - so-called good men doing nothing.
But, to be fair, generally, we had our own jobs and businesses to attend to; and I reckon if we'd had 250-year-old banks to run, then I think most of us would have managed not to run them into ruination, spending and loaning money that wasn't ours, pursuing vainglorious visions of endless growth built on imaginary foundations.
Moreover: the public has need of an embodiment of the third-rate evil besetting us - a pig's head on a stick, to pelt with calumny. And sometimes there is an individual at hand who happens to fit the bill handsomely - a fat pig of really gruesome proportions.
One has to observe that the ostensibly non-porcine qualities for which Fred Goodwin was (briefly) admired, and possibly even liked - coldness, self-assurance, contempt for those beneath him - were on display for all to see in today's letter to Lord Myners (and the blogger Guido Fawkes appears to have a vicarious admiration for selfsame traits.) In the face of such a performance, on some level one has to say 'Bravo.' But I don't think this show is over yet.