Christine Lagarde: The Face of Evil

A practically unspeakable horror of opprobrium has just been emitted Sibyllike from the orifice of the new head, Christine Lagarde, of the International Monetary Fund (which a deceased quondam associate of mine Hulan Jack with good reason called the International Murder Fund.) At the same instant that Greek pensioners are committing suicide in protest over the grinding austerity imposed upon them, and worse yet, the pharmacies there are running out of life saving medicines, Ms. Lagarde pronounces that it is time to pay the piper and that she cares more about dying Africans than dying Greeks. This, after IMF conditionalities for decades have imposed untold immiseration and a hecatomb of death upon those very same Africans Ms. Lagarde sheds copious crocodile tears for now. If anyone hearing this is not repulsed by this overt admission of pure evil, then they have no heart nor mind.

Lately, I have learned that an ancestor of mine was jailed in a town near Salem during the witch trial hysteria as a "mischief maker." It was indeed a black mark upon that most noble of experiments in the Massachussets Bay Charter that Franklin later picked up from Cotton Mather as the basis for the so called establishment clause in our Constitution, the principle of doing good for future generations. However, if ever there were a real life witch in our midst conjuring up poisonous potions to be served to hapless victims it is this soulless woman.

Fredrich Schiller once wrote that Shakespeare's Iago (like Beethoven's Pizarro in his opera Fidelio) was too much a one sided character purely evil and capable of no development to be fit for a dramatic portrayal. But, like her predecessors Hitler or Napoleon, Ms. Lagarde proves that such irredeemable characters are all too real.