Weeping Atlas cedars

“Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”, the Hatter asked Alice. When she couldn’t guess and asked him the answer, he said, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

So here is another riddle. Why are greedy leaders like weeping Atlas cedars?

This occurs in the George Harrison song “Beware of darkness”; at least, all the Internet sites I checked give these words, though for half a century I heard something different. Now we know what greedy leaders are, having rather a lot of them at present; a weeping Atlas cedar is a kind of tree, so what is the similarity? All I can see is that “weeping” suggests hypocrisy (crocodile tears), while the rest is just there for the sake of scan and rhyme.

I don’t think that greedy leaders like trees very much. Indeed, several of them seem to have adopted the chainsaw as an emblem. As Harrison says, “They just want to grow and grow”; so they chop down the trees to drill or dig mines.