The House of Cards....A Faustian Allegory

The House of Cards….
A Faustian Allegory

“And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth forth her untimely figs…”
Revelations 6:13


It had been a day of low karma already, and walking into The Taco Shack nailed the coffin shut.

Dark, musty and smelling of stale beer and cayenne, The Taco Shack represents the stark dichotomy between 5-Star resorts and $2-Beer joints. It is a perfect place to avoid important people and blend into a low side of life.

Inside this dark cavern, the walls teemed with reflecting snippets of life from HiDef TVs. Phantasmagoric scenes of life in plasma flashed incessantly in alternating incongruity. With little imagination one could be living in multiple worlds simultaneously. Sports, news, weather and the World Series of Poker out-screamed one another in an epic battle for attention. My eyes fixated on the poker tables, where serious card games were in progress in Las Vegas, the sleaze capital of the west.

The opulent décor of the casino contrasted sharply with that of The Taco Shack, setting an illusionary scene of someone else’s world open only to the lucky or privileged few. But it was a temporary world. After all, it was a House of Cards… make no mistake about that!

It all took me back to the days of BC ~ “Before Credit.” We no longer live in these now ~ we live in the AD world ~ “After Debt,” and we are learning how short the distance is between the two.

Cards were shuffled, dealt, and flashed. Chips were cast onto the table, bets from people putting their money where their mouths were. The looks, the eyes, the stares, the hats, the sunglasses ~~ mere costumes to disguise every sense of emotion or to reveal clues as to what the cards held. And so it went throughout my dinner. The winners, the losers changed often, revealing the vicissitudes of chance in the House of Cards.

All the intrigue took me away from the horror of my meal. It consisted mainly of a mystery meat wrapped in some mushy maize that mimicked something Mexican. I was afraid to ask the ingredients. You see, I’ve been to street markets in Mexico where “carne” hung, stripped of all outward evidence of its origin. But always there was a conspicuous absence of local dogs and cats. However, here the patrons appeared healthy enough, so I continued to eat.

Interviews were held with the poker players, and the best summary of the night’s card game came from LeRoy from Arkansas. He put it this way: “It’s all a House of Cards, and the higher you build, the more risky it becomes…collapse is inherent and instant, without warning. It’s always a short distance from the penthouse to the outhouse.”

The real estate market flashed onto the plasma of my HiDef mindscreen, and in an epiphany I saw it has always been a House of Cards. We built too high on too much sand, and the rains and the winds came. The wreckage was disastrous ~~ suddenly and without warning.

Welcome to the Brave New World of the House of Cards, and the Faustian Bargain ~ a deal with the devil.

Remember, “…never count your money while you’re sitting at the table….”
The Gambler, Kenny Rogers

We counted too soon….hollow now ring the bells of our boast!

As I left The Taco Shack, the Zeitgeist of today’s culture, I couldn’t help but remember how Nero fiddled as Rome burned, and burned, and burned. Into the night I walked humming the children’s simple rhyme,

“London Bridge is falling down, falling down…my fair lady.”




Bud
August 7, 2008