CROSSPOST: PHIL H: What Does Corruption Look Like?
Phil H.’s subtitle is: “They’ll tell you not to believe what you can see with your own eyes”. The post is about China’s Tang Dynasty poet Han Hong’s “Cold Food Festival” poem…
Along comes Han Hong, writing in the Tang Dynasty more than a millennium ago, to tell you: the East African Plains Ape has been watching power rot into corruption for a very long time—and has been very clear-eyed about how it looks from below. Here Phil H takes Han’s ““Cold Food Festival poem and patiently, expertly unpacks it. Petals, willows, candles, springtime in the China’s Tang Dynasty Chang’an. But then you learn the backstory—that these are supposed to be days of darkness and cold food for everyone, with no flame, no fire, no light—shared austerity as shared commemoration of the misdeeds of the powerful.
Except, of course, that the truly powerful are never in the dark. Imperial dispensation sends literal lines of light from the palace to the mansions of the well-connected, tracing out in wax and smoke the circuits of privilege. Once Phil has walked you through that message from Han Hong, you cannot unsee it. The petals are not just petals; they are favorites floating free of any rooted obligation. The willows do not simply sway; they bend, and we know before whom. The candle-smoke that ought to signify warmth and civilization becomes the visible exhalation of a system that tells the many to shiver so that the few can dine by candlelight.
Every age has its own choreography of corruption—its own ways of making injustice visible, then trying to insist that you don’t believe your lying eyes. Han Hong caught one such choreography in four sharp lines. Phil helps us recognize it:
<https://tangpoetry.substack.com/cp/187421883>