You started out as an elite, a frat boy whose highest life’s ambition was to take medical care away from poor people.  Then, you became one of the youngest members of the House, where the news media proclaimed you a golden boy, a policy guy, the future of the Republican Party.  

It is not clear why the media did this.  Perhaps they enjoy crafting narratives where none exist.  Perhaps they were bored.  Perhaps they just are not that bright.  But they did it, and the myth was born.  You rose faster than Hermes to heights that would have frightened Icarus.    

Now, at the end of your career, you are Speaker of the House, second only to the Vice President in the line of succession to the presidency.  During your time in that exalted position, you have done yeoman’s work in ridding your suit of any last vestige of occupancy.  But now, fading already into well-deserved oblivion, you have resurrected the dream, grasping at one last, desperate effort to feed the poor — to the wealthy.  Your last hope is, as the poet said, to

“… mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race, ….”

Yet, the poet also said,

“Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, ….”

“Some work of noble note.”  If only there were work of noble note to be done, anything at all that might better the common good more so than would attacking the poor.  Would that you but had an opportunity to, say, stand tall in support of democracy against a burgeoning tyrant.  Would that you had been provided an occasion to show what you are made of by defending the rule of law against a lawless sociopath or the free press against a would-be despot. Would that our circumstances allowed you to rise above petty things and point us toward an honorable, humane society by protecting the Dreamers and stopping an evil garden-gnome from ripping children away from their parents.  If only you had been given the opportunities, Paul, with your “will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” imagine the legacy you could have given your children and this country.  

Ah, but you are no Ulysses, Paul, or even an Odysseus.  You never “have suffer'd greatly.”  You never “strove with Gods.”  And the only thing you have drunk “to the lees” was a keg.  So, “ere the end,” Paul, go to Hell.