Slouching toward Des Moines
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 people who would be President are lunatics, liars or both. Here’s the Republican view of the world, and America’s place in it, knit together from their pitches in the last debate: “This country is not respected anymore . . . our freedom, our security and the American dream (are) slipping away. This country is changing. It feels different. We feel like we’re being left behind and left out.
That’s because we now have a President “who wants to change America, who wants to make it more like the rest of the world. And so he undermines the Constitution, and he undermines free enterprise . . . and he betrays our allies and cuts deals with our enemies and guts our military.”
“We have to stop with political correctness. We have to get down to creating a country that’s not going to have the kind of problems that we’ve had with people flying planes into the World Trade Centers, with the — with the shootings in California, with all the problems all over the world.”
“If I’m President, there won’t be stupid deals anymore. We will make America great again. We will win on everything we do.”
Mexicans and Muslims, step aside and let soldiers be solders, men men, America America again.
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. Nearly a century after William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming,” in the aftermath of the Great War, the “blood-dimmed tide” is lapping into and eating up what had seemed solid walls and borders in this season of snuff films, corpses washed up on beaches, mass protests in public squares and sometimes mass sexual assaults, too.
A long season of terror spreaders slipping in amongst refugees fleeing their terror, killing machines remote-controlled from across the world hunting people working on killing machines of their own — of true believers, angry people and insane ones seeking out soft targets and high body counts to reap the earned media rewards of random slaughter.
Of children here in the Americas fleeing places where gangs are the only authority, leaving families behind to risk rape and death and ride the rails thousands of miles north to our border only to be turned back.
Of horrors ever harder to ignore as the planet keeps getting smaller, and hotter, as markets plunge, robots rise and oceans no longer seem to keep the world at bay.
So, Trump, the trucker-hat-sloganed standard-bearer for Americans who don’t want the world intruding on them, who just want to win again or at least have a President who’s not afraid to repeat the word over and over.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image . . . 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 “Heads are spinning,” said Sarah Palin Tuesday, the politician turned failed reality TV star endorsing the reality TV star turned politician. “This is going to be so much fun.”
Things have been less fun for the Democrats, who have the best candidate, one indeed lacking conviction, in Hillary Clinton, who’s spun the straw of government service into a huge pile of family gold, who wants to give America its own twist on Argentina’s disastrous husband-and-wife presidential dynasty and who made it to the White House last time after her husband vowed to get tough on black criminals and she got tough on the women who said he’d done them wrong.
She’s running against a shouty 74-yearold man who’s promising trillions of dollars of free stuff that he’d be about as likely to deliver as a President Trump would be to get Mexico to build and pay for that wall.
But as Trump fever spreads, Democrats are feeling liberated at last to vote their hearts.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? I’m afraid we’re about to find out.
Trump, Yeats & the blood-dimmed tide