The Second Coming

Illustration of the Great Sphinx from worldhistory.org
Click to enlarge.

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: 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?

--William Butler Yeats

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Waitin' for the Weekend: Art Lesson

Is it art or anatomy?  You decide.

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This Is So Wrong (Revised)

The world is heating up far too much these days, and I don't mean the climate.

Long-time readers of this blog will remember that your Head Trucker often used to rant and rave in these posts about fools, frauds, and fanatics - but in recent years, he has simply tired of wasting his breath on the heedless, madding world that seems maniacally intent on tearing itself apart.  When the party degenerates into a knock-down, drag-out brawl, the only sensible thing to do is to get out of the way and not get sucked into the fight.

It has become more and more necessary, in the face of the utter madness that seems to be sweeping across the whole world, like a mass psychosis, to pay less and less attention to the news and try to keep one's inner self centered in thoughts of peace and goodwill, so far as possible.  Tempers are so dreadfully inflamed and minds are so thickly clouded with me-ism and us-ism and to-hell-with-them-ism that I do greatly fear we are living in the calm before the storm - as someone has prophesied:

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.

It may be that cooler heads will somehow prevail; or it may be that a colossal storm will engulf what within living memory was known as the civilized world.  In either case, this old man knows he is powerless to influence the masses.  The best I can do is to try to remain sweet and sound of heart here in this little house, and to do the small things I can do, with as much love - simple and unselfish - as I can muster.  Beyond that, I must leave the world where it has always been, in the hands of God, and trust in His ultimate redemption of our wretched human natures, as my religion teaches me to do.


Revision, 8/15/19, 10:30 p.m.:

Last night after writing a long post here, I felt relieved.  But strangely, I awoke this morning feeling both soiled and exposed, somehow.  Dirty.  Unsettled.  I can't say why, exactly, but all that rant just felt very wrong.  Perhaps it is enough that I just express as best I can the goodness in my heart, and let the rest go.  (I have no pretensions to be a saint, by the way - merely a sinner with a conscience.)

Great evil is roaming the world today, but I no longer feel called to speak about it.  There is no dearth of voices in the world, all screeching and shouting across one another.  I have my opinions, to be sure - and they do not necessarily coincide with what is politically correct, or What Everybody Thinks, at any point on the political spectrum.  And I believe that we are in the middle of a great shift, a turning point of history - a worrisome thing, but of course all civilizations have had their turning points, crises, and conflicts - and through all the ups and downs of this mortal life, we obscure folks can only do our duty to those we love, and hope for the best.

And when we sparrows have lived our day and sung our song, there shall be rest.  Many a troubled soul who fretted and feared for the future has now been sleeping the long sleep for centuries in churchyard or cathedral.  And still the world goes round and round. The long, golden Indian summer of the postwar era is coming to a close - if it has not already ended - and exactly what rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem remains to be seen. Nothing lasts forever in this mortal life, neither men nor the works of men.

Well, so be it.  My grandparents, born in the slow-paced Victorian era, grew up on the farm with little education and did not move to town until 1925.  By the time I was alive and becoming aware of the world's doings some forty years later, the world had changed beyond all recognition for them.  They read the daily papers and listened to the evening news, but most of what they read made no sense to them, hard workers and clean livers that they were.  I'm sure now that the frenzied world of the 1960's - the music, the movies, the clothes, the hair, the protests, and all that was so exciting to the younger generation - must have seemed to them bewildering, senseless, and ugly:  just as the parlous present seems to me now.

But instead of complaining and moaning, they simply went on with their quiet life together just as they always had, living by their own timetable, unruffled, unhurried, heedless of change, still getting up at the crack of dawn every day to begin their chores around the house and yard, and going to bed with the chickens - only there were no longer any chickens to tend, nor cows to milk.

Through all the furor of those times, they remained impassive and steadfast, and their humble little home was a rock of stability for all who needed a refuge or a rest.  Perhaps that is the best way to handle the unfathomable:  just go about your business, tend your garden, keep a steady head, and don't dwell on the madness of the world.  Certainly when I look about me now, I am amazed and alarmed, if not to say outraged, by the breakdown of all that seemed so necessary for the peace and happiness of the world and its peoples.  But what can I do about it?  I seem to be learning a valuable and unexpected lesson here.

As a professor of mine once said, the world is very wicked, and even more foolish than it is wicked.  It needs correction, badly, but I know I cannot reform it, or anyone in it. The fact is, I have enough to do keep myself held together and on track, in body, mind, and spirit.  So for now at least, I think I will leave it to others to denounce the crimes and follies of the times, and close with my only message to the world, an ancient message often repeated, that I am sure would serve to right all that is wrong among us - if only the world would listen for once, and take it to heart:

Speechless

Hope is the thing with feathers--

Today's ominous headline from the New York Times:

As G.O.P. Bends Toward Trump, Critics Either Give In or Give Up

This is just a note to say that I have nothing to say about the state of the nation, the state of the world, or the dark night of ignorance, fear, hatred, and folly that seems to be engulfing humankind at this time, swallowing it whole.  I see the headlines, occasionally I read a whole article, and once in a while I watch a news report on television - it's not that it's fake news, but it is so very often utterly trivial news delivered like tabloid melodrama, even by the top stars of the top networks nowadays, who should know better, and replayed mindlessly, endlessly, in Orwellian fashion until you almost feel you would do anything to make it stop, just stop stop stop stop stop.

I see what is happening and I have nothing to say.  I could say many things but I feel such pain, disgust, and despair at the brutality and ugliness corrupting the world and everyone in it, that it is simply not worth the effort to put my thoughts into words.  Other people have already said, and are saying, the things I would say; although some things I would also say are things nobody wants to hear, either on the right or on the left.  So there would be no point in saying anything, not really.  Anyone with intelligence and good sense can see what I would point out;  if they haven't seen it already, nothing I say would open their eyes.

I see what is happening and I would rather say nothing.  I do not wish to read this new chapter of history, do not want to see it played out.  I feel the ghastly tragedy building day by day, and it sickens me to the core.  But I am too old and tired and heartsick to man the barricades, either literally or figuratively.  I have no strength left to beat my head against a brick wall, which in some way or another I feel I have been doing a long, long time now.  I see the world as I have known it sinking into a black, stinking tide, and I have no idea how to stop it or save it; certainly my little squeaks will be of no help.  Prayer is the last refuge of the helpless; but how often, alas, "that which they greatly feared came upon them."

I see what is happening and I have no words.  Since the dawn of civilization, priests, poets, prophets, preachers, and philosophers have spun out a fulsome tapestry of wise words, but words alone do no good when people do not listen.  Time and again, fathers and mothers have labored across the long years to build what their careless children, or children's children, spurn and toss away, or destroy in a day:  it is all recorded in the histories of other countries, other ages.  All that I would say, in some way or another, has already been said and can be found among the golden writings of mankind; but to the willfully ignorant, the voices of the sages are like those of so many birds chirping in the wind, an indignant ruffle of feathers and no more.

I see what is happening and I cannot say more.  I know that nothing I say will change anyone's mind, and at this point it would not help my feelings, either.  The world will bump and grind and careen along in just the way it has so many times before, to the inevitable end of its present course; and after some cataclysm or another, it will pick itself back up and with however few are left start all over again - as it has so many times before.  The end of the world as we know it is not quite the same as The End of the World - no matter how cruel the hurt or how great the destruction, the very next morning the sun rises up exactly on schedule, as if nothing had happened.  And the irresistible, irrepressible cycles of life begin anew.   This of course gives prophets of doom a bad name, so why bother to be a Cassandra?  Clear-sightedness certainly did her no good, nor anyone else, come to think of it.

I see what is happening, and I have no words.  Thoughts but no words.  Feelings but no hopes.  What can anyone say that has not already been said, and better than I can do?

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. . . .

--W. B. Yeats, 1919

At this late age, I am already worn out with grief and loss. I wish I had something more to offer my readers, but I don't; I can barely keep my own head above water. What will happen will happen, and we must all deal with it the best way we can.

I wish you peace, and comfort amid the storms of life, my friends. I don't know what else to say.  What is there to say in the face of the unspeakable?

I could be wrong.  I hope I am.

Fools, Frauds, and Fanatics

The Blind Leading the Blind,
Pieter Breugel the Elder, 1568.
Click to enlarge.

This may or may not become a regular feature of the Blue Truck. As I said in my New Year's Eve post, there's just not much point in my complaining about the state of the world and the people in it. Nobody wants to hear yet another grumpy old man's rant, and the intertubes are already choked with suchlike.

Still, sometimes I run across items that in my younger days I might have expatiated on at length. Being older and wiser now, not to say wearier, I think I will just throw some out and let you fellas make of them what you will. Today's choices:

1. From Andrew Sullivan, talking about the fiscal cliff deal, but making an important and accurate observation about economics and the history of nations:

I do not see why the Pentagon is immune from real sacrifice, when we have no serious military rival in the world and are spending more in real terms than we did when Reagan out-spent the Soviets. . . .

History is replete with examples of great powers who undid themselves by spending on war and empire - in the end often with debt - while neglecting the core concerns of the domestic economy. Hegemonic America is following imperial Spain and imperial Britain into the same morass. But it is a choice, not a fate.

2. Also from Andrew Sullivan, on "the broken American polity":

Senator Ben Nelson said recently that many Republicans have yet to accept the presidential election of 2008, let alone the re-election of 2012. I see no real evidence to the contrary. Whether this is due to race, or culture, or fanaticism (they regarded Bill Clinton as illegitimate as well) I do not pretend to know. We know also, of course, that the corrupt gerrymandering of House districts allows those with power to rig the system so they can retain power - even when they have no broad public support. And we know that the whitest, rightest part of the Republican base controls the primaries and is determined to destroy any member of Congress who votes against the religion of permanent insolvency - which is what "no-revenue-increases-ever" means as we near a demographic wave of older folks. What a perverse cause: a party dedicated above all to the permanent, chronic insolvency of the American government. The cuts they need without any new revenues would simply end the welfare state in America and would never be tolerated by the middle classes in practice. And tax reform will only get us so far.

This, then, remains a country in a Cold Civil War - not far off the geographical contours of the first, but with the inheritors of the Confederacy concentrated in the South and now also with serious pockets of absolutists in the more rural parts of the country as a whole. Maybe it was precisely because Barack Obama campaigned against partisan polarization that the GOP has decided to ratchet it up. The right-wing media-industrial complex - from Limbaugh to Hannity to Drudge - earns money from conflict, not compromise. And these lucrative media institutions have taken over from what's left of the conservative intelligentsia (three decades ago a flourishing, growing and open group, now shrinking fast into calcified, partisan hacks).

3. Yeats prophetically wrote, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Here's an example of the former, who happens to be a Georgetown law professor and means exactly what he says in the title of his article, "Let's Give Up on the Constitution" - which was published in the New York Times, no less.

I won't even dignify this goofball's asininity by quoting him, but it just goes to show that it is entirely possible to be a very well-educated fool. Where would we be without the Constitution now, hmmm? If I had any say in the matter, he would be dismissed from his job immediately, and posted to one of those couple dozen African countries where nobody gives a damn about constitutions already, and see how he prospers.

4. Joe.My.God. quotes the Rev. Franklin Graham, Billy's son, who pontificated last week on the decline of the nation being largely due to "same-sex couples lining up at courthouses in several states to receive their marriage licenses," among other things: "a reflection of the moral corruption that has infected our entire nation. These are indeed dark days."

Of course you know the Pope and many other petrified religious leaders have said the same thing before, ad infinitum et ad nauseam. A new thing in the world: for centuries, the religionists decried gays for being promiscuous libertines, with dead-end lives that contribute no good to society. Now that we are finally able to marry and form long-lasting, publicly recognized unions, the religionists shout about how immoral that is. Which just goes to show that it is entirely possible to be a blind guide and hypocrite, though claiming to be a man of God.