The streets began to fill with professional comfort-givers; priests, nuns, politicians and television personalities – now with no recognized formal function but determined to try and maintain some claim on events as they unfold.

With a permission based solely on the same cosmic perversity and absolutely nothing else, these comfort-givers were given special dispensation from the labour at hand in order to offer empty promises and visions of a future that cannot possibly exist now. Walking among the weeping, toiling crowds.

Hand-wringing.

Glad-handing.