Real Boy, no Strings.

Charge your glasses for a man who needs no introduction
and insists on giving one.

He arrived among us already explained.
Other men carry a name; he carries a verdict,
and recites it aloud in case the jury –
meaning everyone –
has forgotten its own decision.
He was first in his year.
The year, he is too modest to add,
was not consulted.

To call him self-made flatters the workmanship.
He is self-issued: a distinction minted at home,
a laurel posted to oneself,
first class,
a genius certified by its only shareholder.
He has grasped the great economy of the age –
that a reputation, like a rumour,
need only be repeated to be believed,
and need never be earned to be repeated.

Observe the conjuring, for it is the whole of him.
A young man sat some examinations
and, helped by luck and a lenient morning,
passed them handsomely.
This is a fact: contingent, dated, dull.
Watch what he does with it.
The mark becomes a Gift,
the Gift becomes a Nature,
and a Nature, being natural,
asks no proof and permits no inquiry.
He has turned a transcript into a destiny,
and offers you the receipt
as though it were the meal.

When the subject of himself is briefly exhausted –
it tires long before he does –
he reaches for the largest emergency within arm's length.
Apropos of nothing, between the soup and the fish,
he warns us our continent is being replaced.
He would die for the West.
So far he has only bored it.
He has mistaken having opinions for having a soul,
an error the age now pays a salary.

You will wonder whether anything in him objects.
Something does.
There is a small voice in him, as in all of us,
appointed to say 'this is not true',
and 'why did you need to say it' –
and he has not silenced it,
which would at least be a kind of innocence.
He has gagged the cricket instead,
which is a different thing from killing it,
and keeps it as one keeps a thing on display:
bound, fed nothing, and – note – still breathing.

We laugh, naturally.
He is absurd, and absurdity disarms,
which is precisely what makes it dangerous.
A buffoon is only a man of authority
who has not yet been handed the authority.
Give him a little – a committee, a lanyard, eventually a law –
and the comedy at last acquires a subject.
The gag he keeps on his own conscience
comes off,
and goes onto you.
He will be entirely correct about it.
He will have studied the regulations
more closely than anyone who believed in them.

So: to our friend.
May he rise exactly as far as he merits
and not one inch beyond,
for the room that toasts him tonight
is the room he means one day to chair –
and he forgets a face
only after he has finished with it.

Raise your glasses.
He is counting them.