Here is the entire 84-page Iraq Study Group Report -- with all supporting documentation factored in, and, most crucially, the all-important hallway sidebars, coffee urn colloquia, urinal powwows, cloak room parleys, informal parking garage flip chartery, finger-pointing PowerPoints, redacted minority reports and unpublished dissenting opinions -- processed, digested, summarized and extruded.
In 22 lines.
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
-- William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
(Yeats text courtesy this site )
8 comments:
Yowsa!!
i have been recalling "things fall apart; the center doesn't hold" for nigh onto six years now. thanks for the whole piece. chilling in its precision, and application to this time, this place.
I've had this thing on my fridge door for about 20 years. It fits the IRSG report but also fits the conservative movement in general.
At about the same time, I started passing around copies of Sinclair Lewis' wordy tome, too. This last election gives me some hope that it won't happen here, but...ya nevah know.
Happy Winter Solstice to ya, drify.
Infant Innocence
A.E. Housman
The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;
He has devoured the infant child.
The infant child is not aware
It has been eaten by the bear.
see...THAT is why i LOVE this blog...
SPOT on DRIFTY...
...like lancelot's squire...
"Umm...message for you, sir..."
It never ceases to amaze me, Drifty, at how you and I keep meeting at the same poems, movies and quotes and pictures. I'd used this poem (one of my alltime faves) recently to draw a parallel.
The falconer is Bush and the falcon who can no longer hear him is Nouri al Maliki. Or Iraq in general.
that's really been the quintessential poem since 2002.
and good on you with the chinatown rosemary's baby thing. i think that sums it up well.
Bush is a braindamaged beast... slouching towards Bedlam.
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