Guest Column

Picturesque ruins, Glendalough, Ireland, 25 April 2022.

Forgive me, but I'm just going to do a couple of cuts and pastes today. 

Lately, I and Edward Keenan, the US correspondent for the Toronto Star, have been thinking about the same poem, The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats.

Here's the poem, written after the first World War in January 1919 and during the pandemic they had then:

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 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?

***

Here's an article written by Edward Keenan alluding to the poem. I've edited it for length, but give full credit to Mr. Keenan. (Shoo! you nasty copyright lawyers). Things must be bad when a Toronto Star writer cites a writer for the Globe and Mail:

This Week in Politics

Watching news from around the world this week summoned to mind the words of William Butler Yeat’s The Second Coming:

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold…”

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by a gunman while giving a speech Friday, stunning the world. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation after the waves of scandal that have defined his career finally caught up with him and members of his own cabinet had abandoned him. A “humanitarian catastrophe” was reportedly at hand in Ukraine’s Luhansk region as Russians took near-total control of the area, and the United Nations warned of a worldwide “looming hunger catastrophe” because of that war.  

[It all] adds to a sense of — well, falling apart, of growing chaos spiralling out of control.

In the U.S., the stock market was down again after a report delivered news you might otherwise consider good (employment and wages up) but that fed fears of continued inflation and accompanying interest rate hikes that could spur a recession. U.S. President Joe Biden heralded the jobs as signs of his success, but voters appear to disagree, as inflation worries top their list of ballot-box concerns. Biden has made fighting inflation his “number one goal” for months, and despite weeks of slowly declining gas prices in the U.S., he hasn’t tamed the rough beast yet.

Meanwhile, across the country: yet another mass shooting of an increasingly familiar kind Biden and everyone else seem powerless to stop. And a series of decisions from the Supreme Court that repeal abortion rights, disembowel gun control measures, gut climate change regulations and weaken the separation of church and state.

There were reports this week that Democrats and progressives were “frustrated” with Biden’s inability to do much to handle the overlapping crises they perceive to be plaguing the U.S. One told CNN Biden’s administration was “rudderless, aimless, and hopeless.” 

[...]

Biden’s popular support in polls is disastrously low. ...

And yet, as [Andrew Coyne for the Globe and Mail] asked, what alternative is on offer? Unlike in Britain where a famously buffoonish, dishonest populist was finally given the boot by his own party, the right-of-centre parties in Canada and the U.S. have been almost entirely taken over by buffoonish populist authoritarian movements fed on resentment and conspiracy theories.

[...]

[E]ven as new hearings for new revelations in the Jan. 6 commission are scheduled to continue to outline how close the country came to being victim of a coup, the movement that tried to stage it marches on: Florida schools are now being required to audit their ideology for signs of being too woke, star Rep. Lauren Boebert won her primary after denouncing the separation of church and state; South Carolina became the first state post-Roe v. Wade to bring forward a new near-total ban on abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon consider a case that could give states veto power over federal election rules and results. Donald Trump stumps on the campaign trail as the party he still unofficially leads appears poised to win control of Congress in elections later this year.  

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” Yeats’ poem famously says, again feeling like a summary of the moment. Perhaps conviction isn’t what — or not only what — one side is missing, and “best” isn’t a superlative many would apply to any of the bunch. But the worst in our politics across the continent are surely the loudest, the angriest, the most strident. Meanwhile, things fall apart.

Citizens are caught between a squish and a hard place — between the ineffective and the unhinged, the incapable and the unfit. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” as Yeats had it. And yet, finding no place to turn to for stability, or sanity, or competence.

Well said. 

A little long, though.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen