A civil servant hailing back to the Lindsay administration (he started as a budget analyst in 1973), Mr. Spiegel is a proud, if mildly surprised, survivor of the Giuliani administration.
Helgi and the host of men ride away, and Sigrún and her servant go back to their house.
After all, we have just been reading in the Torah about Abraham's sending his trusty servant, Eliezer, back to the land of the patriarch's birth, there to discern and recruit a worthy wife for Abraham's son, for Isaac.
His undisciplined soldiers have pillaged government ministries, making it hard for civil servants to get back to work.
Both before and after the movie, as a Bangladeshi I could not help but let my mind wander beyond the racially segregated America of the 1950's and 60's to modern day lives of domestic servants back home.
The town was full of retired civil servants and army officers who had served in India, many of whom had brought Indian servants back with them.
I love the image of the flatterers – their sycophancy dampened – and of the servants lugging the throne back to the shore.
New York's most galling public servants need to get back to Albany and do their jobs, and they should start by restoring control of New York City's schools to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
That breakdown came just a month after a five-day shutdown, and was further extended by a historic pair of winter storms that shut the government down again on the very day Washington's civil servants were finally going back to work.
