Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold

The Second Coming

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

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 MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
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
Reel 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?

Looking at the political trainwreck of the last few weeks, one can't help but think the paradigm shift under way is coming close to a climax. Of course, one has thought that before and one has been wrong, so we'll see, won't we?

It's not just the gold-plated turd that is Trump, though he is certainly the Shiny Object keeping attention away from More Important Things. His constant ravings have fully captivated the media, and they hold more sway than they should over the public attention.

Yet many are beginning -- finally -- to see that Trump isn't an outlier of his class; he is a representative of these insensitive pricks who've ruled us for doG knows how long. He is them, they are him. The entrance of one prickish billionaire after another into the political fray demonstrates clearly that these people, mostly privileged white men, are appallingly dense, vicious, stupid and cruel. Well, yes. That it wasn't obvious before is the peculiar thing.

The whole "populist" act that Trump has been putting on is failing -- the Foxconn Debacle being a case in point -- but he keeps trying, so I'll grant him that. He's also methodically putting together a War Upon War finale to his reign that might just pull the popular will right along with him into the Abyss.

Yeats wrote his dirge post-Easter Rising, post-WWI. He could see -- how could he not? -- that what Used to Be was no more, and wasn't coming back, either.

We're not at that point yet, but we're getting closer.

So I'll go make some coffee in my ancient MidCentury Universal percolator. Sit and contemplate with Siddarth Gautam Buddha, nag champa incense wafting through our dusty, drafty house in the middle of nowhere. Wondering what today's new cycle will bring.