The Hollow Men (of Pakistan)

 

The Hollow Men (of Pakistan)
(with an apology to T.S. Eliot)

“We are not the doctors; we are the disease!”        Alexander Herzen

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”                         

                                                        George Orwell, The Animal Farm

“The country is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.”           
                (To borrow from the wise man of Nigeria, Chinua Achebe)

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I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Scheming together
Heads filled, from ear to ear,
With dried dung. Alas!
Our ugly gibberish, when
We scream together,
Belching pieties,
Is utterly meaningless---hollow, stinky--
Like our rotten lives.

We are the hollow men, the filthy hustlers
We buy and we sell
We pander and peddle---everything, everyone:
Ourselves,
Our kith and kin,
Compatriot, brother, father, son, husband--
No backbone, neither honor nor dignity--
We bend readily
For a few dollars,
We even sell our mothers.

We are the toxic vermin
Dark clouds of voracious locusts
We are the plague that
Defiles the face of
The “pure” land
Like puss-oozing carbuncles.

We are the hollow men
The shape shifting, bullshitting impostors
Tirelessly spouting humbug
That fills the air
Like a numbing, dumbing white noise
We are
The “ruling elite”, the “umpire”
The “boys”, the “establishment”---
All nasty euphemisms for
Bloodsucking, villainous cartoons
Cabals of vile con men
Mafioso civvies and
Uniformed goons.

II

This is the damned land
This is mob land
Rioting, burning, posse lynching
Bedlam reigns supreme
Here we sing songs
Colorful carols
Of faith, discipline and unity
Of brotherhood and sisterhood
In the “pure” motherland,
We keep on chanting, these gory
Anthems of hypocrisy.

Words without meaning---our poisonous trope.
Compassion as fashion, deception as hope.

III

Here we sell made-up dreams
Soothing stories in textbooks
Fairytales on TV screens
Told by pumped-up noisy fiends
These murderous nightmares, in reality,
Mock the babbling screen ogres
The soulless chattering monsters.

IV

Those who dare speak
Truth to power
With untied tongues and unsold souls
With eyes that see
And hearts not dead---not yet
See through us, and call out:
“You are the genuinely bogus hollow men
The stuffed men (and women).
Disgrace! Disgrace! Disgrace!”

For more, please click: Uncle Marx, Education: Old and New