Holding Out for World War One

If you're old enough in bloggy years to remember a pre-Twitter era when posts that ran for more than one paragraph were not considered excessive, you probably remember that one of the most-quoted poems during the Age of Bush was William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming", which was written in the terrible aftermath of World War I.!*

It is a perfectly constructed mosaic of so many brilliant poetic tessellations -- each appropriate for so may occasions --

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 conviction, 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?

that the slow, gentle rise of those first lines are often overlooked --

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

-- in the ferocious run of Apocalyptic beats that follow on behind it.

But the collapse of civilization the poem describes all begins there, with the loss of control.

The falcon here is wildness -- a predatory primal force that has been tamed and leashed by the aristocracy to hunt and to retrieve on its behalf. But then one day that wild thing spirals up too high and far away, and slips from the dominion of its handler.

After which, doom follows quickly. Because while only a great fool does not know that dark forces can never be truly and finally subdued (Tom Waits [channeling an ancient Roman saying] sings You can drive out nature with a pitch fork. But it always comes roaring back again in "Misery Is The River Of The World")...

...the falconer forgets, and in the moment that he loses control over the forces he thought he had safely contained, the nightmare which had always been waiting there (through "twenty centuries of stony sleep") is suddenly upon him.*

And then "Things fall apart..."

This was all very much on my mind when skimming over this by one of the 63 new staffers and interns and ghost-writers a d assorted other Gunga Dins that have been brought on board at "The Daily Beast" to keep Mr. Sullivan's blog chugging along:

Moderates Are Bold (and Radicals Are Timid)

by Jonathan Rauch

...
A grand bargain would serve the country well. The alternative, a series of stop-and-go incremental deficit reduction packages, each accompanied by bloody political combat, is not as good. And note, please, that failure to do the deal carries a price, which is to re-electrify the third rail of entitlement cuts.

I think blame rests primarily with the Republican side, because I think that a critical mass of congressional Democrats would have squawked and squirmed but would, in the end, have voted for a grand bargain—whereas Tea Partyized Republicans just would not. But let's not kid ourselves: what we're seeing here is a result of the systematic underrepresentation of moderates in both parties, because moderates are the constituency for a hostage trade: they would rather solve the problem than stay pure and score political points.

Not to pick on Mr. Rauch particularly, but part of me just wants to laugh at every new, two-bit pseudo-intellectual Villager wannabe desperate to get in on the "both sides do it" scam before the bubble bursts and they all have to get real jobs, go back to grad school, or go back to covering sharks, missing White girls and famous political penises.

They do not understand -- or, more likely are simply too callow and cowardly to face -- the reality of what is going on. That this is has nothing do do with Mr. Rauch's shallow, ignorant assertion about the "systematic underrepresentation of moderates in both parties". That instead this is about a Republican Party which is now in the hands of people who view an endless future of "bloody political combat" as a great good thing.

Who desperately want to loose mere anarchy upon the world.

Who want to watch it burn.

*(Thanks, Alexander-from-the-comments)