If you know your P. G. Wodehouse, you’ll remember the passage in Right Ho, Jeeves in which Tom Travers is much preoccupied by the Exchequer’s claim upon him:
“Is he still upset about that income-tax money?” asks his nephew, Bertie Wooster.
“Upset is right,” replies Aunt Dahlia. “He says that Civilisation is in the melting-pot and that all thinking men can read the writing on the wall.”
“What wall?”
“Old Testament, ass,” snaps Aunt Dahlia. “Belshazzar’s feast.”
“Oh, that, yes,” says Bertie. “I’ve often wondered how that gag was worked. With mirrors, I expect.”
A lot of writing on the wall these days. A half-remembered quatrain from Jonathan Swift has been dancing around my brain in recent weeks:
A baited banker thus desponds,
From his own hand foresees his fall,
They have his soul, who have his bonds;
’Tis like the writing on the wall.
Indeed, ’tis. The very title of Swift’s poem, “The Run Upon the Bankers,” seems very archaic three centuries on. We don’t have “runs” on banks anymore. Instead, U.S. and European governments intervene to “save” them—whether they want to be saved or not. Back during the presidential primary campaign, there was one of those cringe-making questions about what the candidates considered their greatest weakness—to which the oleaginous John Edwards gave the even more cringe-making answer that his greatest weakness was that he was too passionate about helping poor people. And a couple of days later Barack Obama drolly observed that, if he’d known that was the kind of answer you were supposed to give, he’d have said his greatest weakness was that he wanted to help old ladies across the street, but that not all old ladies wanted to cross the street.
But that was then, and this is now. Now he prowls Wall Street, yanking old ladies across from the sunny side to walk in the shade with their blues on parade. Stuart Varney recounted the tale of an American bank forced against its will to accept government money from TARP (the “Toxic Asset Relief Program”) last fall under threat of a public audit. So it got dragged across the street. Recently, it tried to repay the money (with interest), only to be told by the government that they won’t accept it and, if the chairman persists, there will be “adverse” consequences. As Mr. Varney put it in the Wall Street Journal, the bank boss “sees the writing on the wall and he wants out.”
The “writing on the wall” is not the run on the bank feared by Swift’s banker but something worse: the annexation of the private sector by an all-controlling statism. Wall-wise, that’s the most immediate writing up there, the opening sentence, as it were. The image comes from the Book of Daniel, when Babylon’s king throws a wild party and, in the midst of his drunkenness, toasts the gods of gold, silver and various other commodities. No sooner has he done so than the gag with mirrors (as Bertie Wooster has it) appears on his plaster, spelling out with disembodied fingers the currency units “mene mene, tekel, upharsin,” and none of the seers Belshazzar keeps on the payroll has a clue what it portends.
Now the writing on the wall is back in fashion. In Banquo’s Ghosts, the new thriller by Rich Lowry and Keith Korman, it springs unbidden into the dreams of an unlikely undercover agent in Iran:
“He imagined he knew what Belshazzar must have felt when those words appeared on the wall during his feast, damning his worship of false gods:
“Mene. Mene. Tekel. Parsin.
“A half dollar, a half dollar, a penny, and two bits. Except Johnson didn’t need a Daniel to interpret this sign for him.
“He wrapped his arms around his queasy belly and sat buffeted in the night, the recesses of his mind calling up somehow that in Aramaic parsin had been a pun on Persian.”
It had. After all his A-list wise men have failed to divine the meaning on the masonry, the King calls Daniel the Jew to explain things, which Daniel does, very bluntly:
Mene: “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.”
Tekel: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”
Upharsin: “Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.”
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