Johnny Cash sang this at Folsom Prison 50 years ago:
Yes, they’re hanging Joe Bean this morning
for a shooting that he never did.
He killed twenty men by the time he was ten –
he was an unruly kid.
It might be a fitting description of the Salisbury poisoning case. If Moscow didn’t do it, then it’s getting a generous taste of its own medicine.
History is genre-fluid. Pure tragedy is rare and inefficient; today’s playbill says Skank vs. Skunk. If we’re lucky, we’ll get an upgrade to comic horror. A leather-trousered harridan chops off the Kraken’s phosphorous tentacles.
By way of limping analogy, the Falklands war ended auspiciously for those Argentines who didn’t get shot or drowned. But no one doubts it was the Argentines who occupied the Isla Soledad for two months and a half.