Things Fall Apart

In 1919, when it seemed the whole world had just damn near been blown apart beyond repair, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote:

Things fall apart; the center 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 filled with passionate intensity.

 

In 2020, although the numbers are bigger, the electrons are faster and the people are undoubtedly smarter, we . . .

having learned the great lessons of the War to end all Wars, and then having learned, 20 years later, the necessity of driving the nazis and fascists back into their holes,

and then after another 40 years, having learned the lesson that Cold War is less lethal than hot war, but far more frustrating and probably more mentally and psychologically debilitating than the old hot war scenario . . .

we find ourselves once again in a situation where it appears that:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

. . .and although the blood-dimmed tide is not completely loosed again, God forbid that it should be. 

But the extremist tail-ends of both sides are once again back to their old tricks: fomenting discord and confusion; the boogaloos and antifas foaming at the mouth to drum up some fresh blood and mayhem, and thereby to realize on reality tv all the blood and gore we’ve been seeing on degenerate entertainment screens since psycho in the ’50’s when I was but a kindergartner . . .

and meanwhile back at the inevitable  crash scene

the republicans have blown their wad reigning down megalopoly money at the top to trickle down, and they’ve used all their monetary tricks so that now they’re out of aces and turning to a donald duck bundle of sticks scenario, so that now we come to discover

it’s time to let  the democrats sit in the hot seat for awhile so they can do their thing and throw money at the bottom end so it percolates up as the greenbacks become more and more irrelevant and everybody gets a meal ticket and a green card while the 1%ers hunker down somewhere

and I, trying to sleep, evading the midnight menace, turn to the pages of history for understanding, only to uncover, alas, more discouraging old-news. . .

the blood-dimmed tide of innocence is (still) loosed upon the world;

and as the blood-drained son of man was crucified, 

in Washington the ceremony of liberty was assassinated . . .

(from a biography of Frederick Douglass, There Once Was a Slave, by Shirley Graham in 1947)

Things are forever falling apart; the center cannot hold, and yet . . . and yet . . .

Good luck with that!

King of Soul