Everything Potent Is Dangerous

Wallace Stegner was one of the true greats of 20th century American letters.  Although no writer is likely ever to express "what I believe" perfectly, Stegner's contribution to Edward R. Murrow's 1950s radio show -- This I Believe -- is as close as anyone has yet come. 

Everything Potent is Dangerous

by Wallace Stegner

It is terribly difficult to say honestly, without posing or faking, what one truly and fundamentally believes. Reticence or an itch to make public confession may distort or dramatize what is really there to be said, and public expressions of belief are so closely associated with inspirational activity, and in fact so often stem from someone’s desire to buck up the downhearted and raise the general morale, that belief becomes an evangelical matter.

In all honesty, what I believe is neither inspirational nor evangelical. Passionate faith I am suspicious of because it hangs witches and burns heretics, and generally I am more in sympathy with the witches and heretics than with the sectarians who hang and burn them. I fear immoderate zeal, Christian, Moslem, Communist, or whatever, because it restricts the range of human understanding and the wise reconciliation of human differences, and creates an orthodoxy with a sword in its hand.

I cannot say that I am even a sound Christian, though the code of conduct to which I subscribe was preached more eloquently by Jesus Christ than by any other. About God I simply do not know; I don’t think I can know.

However far I have missed achieving it, I know that moderation is one of the virtues I most believe in. But I believe as well in a whole catalogue of Christian and classical virtues: in kindness and generosity, in steadfastness and courage and much else. I believe further that good depends not on things but on the use we make of things. Everything potent, from human love to atomic energy, is dangerous; it produces ill about as readily as good; it becomes good only through the control, the discipline, the wisdom with which we use it. Much of this control is social, a thing which laws and institutions and uniforms enforce, but much of it must be personal, and I do not see how we can evade the obligation to take full responsibility for what we individually do. Our reward for self-control and the acceptance of private responsibility is not necessarily money or power. Self-respect and the respect of others are quite enough.

All this is to say that I believe in conscience, not as something implanted by divine act, but as something learned from infancy from the tradition and society which has bred us. The outward forms of virtue will vary greatly from nation to nation; a Chinese scholar of the old school, or an Indian raised on the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, has a conscience that will differ from mine. But in the essential outlines of what constitutes human decency we vary amazingly little. The Chinese and the Indian know as well as I do what kindness is, what generosity is, what fortitude is. They can define justice quite as accurately. It is only when they and I are blinded by tribal and denominational narrowness that we insist upon our differences and can recognize goodness only in the robes of our own crowd.

Man is a great enough creature and a great enough enigma to deserve both our pride and our compassion, and engage our fullest sense of mystery. I shall certainly never do as much with my life as I want to, and I shall sometimes fail miserably to live up to my conscience, whose word I do not distrust even when I can’t obey it. But I am terribly glad to be alive; and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American, with all the rights and privileges that those words connote; and most of all I am humble before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility, and being born luckier than most of the world’s millions, I am also born more obligated.

The Witness Has Rights

     What is the best line in A Few Good Men – the classic courtroom drama starring Tom Cruise (as Navy defense lawyer Lt. Kafee) and Jack Nicholson (as Col. Jessup, the commander of Marine ground forces, Guantanamo Bay)?  Next to “You can’t handle the truth,” most people would probably choose the climactic moment when Jessup confesses to the crime of ordering the savage beating (resulting in death) of a young troubled Marine under his command:

     Lt. Kafee: Did you order the Code Red?

     Col. Jessup: You’re goddamned right I did!

     But this is not, I respectfully submit to my colleagues of the Bar, the best line in the movie.  The best line is what Lt. Kafee says immediately after Jessup’s confession:

      May it please the Court.  I suggest the jury be dismissed so that we can move to an immediate Article 39 session.  The witness has rights.

     Jessup is then immediately read his rights.  For this small town American lawyer, that’s the goose-bump moment.  That’s the lump-in-the-throat moment. 

     What this small town American lawyer is going to say next will offend some readers.  At a minimum, in this community of four major military installations, it will sound undiplomatic.  But I’m not a diplomat and this needs to be said:  Our military forces stationed abroad – in places like Guantanamo Bay (of all places!) – do next to nothing to protect our constitutional liberties as set forth in the Bill of Rights and elsewhere.

     I will try to explain.  But first, back to the movie.

     On the witness stand, Jessup is cocksure, condescending, and absolutely certain that Marines like him are the only thing keeping lazy & complacent pansies like Kafee from losing their liberties.  Jessup lectures Kafee that we live in a world with walls and that those walls need people like him to stand guard.  The implication is that if the walls go unguarded – anywhere on the planet, apparently – then some boogey-man aggressor will cross a vast ocean, install a despotic form of government, and rip up the U.S. Constitution.

     And who is going to protect us, asks Jessup, from this terrible (and for some reason, always imminent) fate:

     [to Kafee] You? You, Lt. WEIN-berg?

     Actually, Col. Jessup, it is Lt. Weinberg who will protect us.  Because here’s the thing.  None of the tyrants of the 20^th century posed any risk to the constitutional rights of Americans.  Hitler could not cross the English Channel.  (Conversely, think of the almost inhuman effort involved when the Allies crossed in the other direction on D-Day.)  He was not going to cross the Atlantic Ocean – ever – and institute unlawful search and seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment.  There was no possibility that he would ever come here to institute a state religion or to eliminate freedom of the press or to implement cruel and unusual punishments.  He was a menace to European civilization, he was a murderer, and he needed to be taken out.  American forces played a crucial and justly proud role in his necessary demise.  But the point here is that his demise had nothing to do with eliminating a threat to the constitutional freedoms of Americans.

     Throughout our history, our armed forces have been sent to fight wars for lots of reasons – some very noble (e.g., taking out the Nazis) and some less so (Crazy Horse would have something to say here).  They have fought for territory (the Indian Wars; the Spanish-American War).  They have fought for access to resources (the two Gulf Wars; the Second World War).  They have fought to defend important allies (the First World War) and to destroy murderous tyrants (the Second World War).  They have fought to expand the country’s geopolitical influence (all of the above, as well as Vietnam, Korea and Afghanistan).  In a few cases, they have even fought for revenge (the Second World War and Afghanistan).  But at least since the Civil War, America’s armed forces have not fought one single war (or even a limited military campaign) in defense of any constitutional freedoms – for the simple reason that those freedoms have never been seriously at risk from external threats.

     I love our military.  They are asked to do a terrible job and get little but empty praise from politicians in return.  But the idea that our military protects our constitutional freedoms is one of the Grand Myths of American History.  Lt. Kafee’s four simple words to the arrogant war-monger Col. Jessup blows that myth out of the water:

     “The witness has rights.” Here, in an American courtroom, and nowhere else.

     Goose-bumps.

Visit to Tulum

An excerpt from the vacation journal (July 12, 2011):

Today, we took the bus tour to the Mayan ruins at Tulum (Spanish for “walls,” we were told).  It’s right on the coast about as far south from Playa del Carmen as Cancun is north.  The area of the ruins is amazing but the parking lot and shopping area where you pull up is all tarted up for American tourists with the standard souvenir shacks and aggressive merchants.  At least they have the good sense to put all the touristy stuff a full kilometer inland so as not to ruin the experience – no pun intended.  We bought a small can of insect-repellent for ten bucks (!) because the tour guide on the bus warned us that disease carrying insects were not unheard of in these here parts.  (He probably gets a commission.)

The site of the ruins is breath-taking in its beauty and awe-inspiring in the sense of the “long view” it tends to invoke in a thoughtful observer.  We received a short walking tour where we learned some fascinating history about the Mayans, their religious practices and class system, their first interactions with the Spanish, and their ultimate demise.  They gave a cheezy little "demonstration" of a human sacrifice – a practice they say evolved fairly late in the arc of the Mayan story (which ran, roughly from 1,500 B.C. to 1,500 A.D).  Proper sacrifice technique was critical because the victim had to be alive long enough to see his own heart beating before dying.  And the Mayan God would not be propitiated by anything less than a still-beating heart.

At one point, the tour guide mentioned that it was considered an honor to volunteer for a human sacrifice.  The Mayan priests convinced the lower class rubes (who, incidentally, lived outside the walls of the city) that volunteers went straight to heaven – by-passing the numerous levels of purgatory and heaven-lite that normal schlubbs had to endure on their way up to the penthouse suites of the divine realm.  I found myself literally laughing out loud at this.  Not at the practice, per se, but at how little the holy-roller hucksters have changed.  We may not have any more religions that practice human sacrifice, but the priests, pastors, rabbis and imams still have the masses convinced that special favors await them if they will just do what the holy man says, which today, usually means mailing in lots of cash!  Or, fly an airplane into a tall building and get 72 virgins in paradise.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la mȇme chose.

Shakespeare's England

June 13, 2011

The Thomas Jefferson Hour

Attn:  Mr. Clay Jenkinson

P.O. Box 7132

Bismarck, ND 58507

            Subject:  Shakespeare’s England

Dear Clay:

            Thank you for all you are doing to bring intelligent discussion of the humanities to a broad listening public.  Our national discourse would be greatly elevated if there were more shows like yours (and fewer hours of talk radio).

            As I write this letter, I believe you have just returned from your cultural tour of “Shakespeare’s England.”  I assume you are aware that a growing number of historians, scholars, Supreme Court justices, journalists, and Shakespearean actors & directors have joined the ranks of giant intellects like Mark Twain in rejecting as preposterous the notion that the man baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon as “Guilianmus filius Johannes Shakspere” wrote the plays and poems of “William Shakespeare.”  Yet, I gather from your inclusion of Stratford in your cultural tour that you do not share Twain’s skepticism.

            In my more than ten years of reading almost everything ever published on this question, I find that the defenders of the traditional attribution really hate this topic.  And if there is one thing that seems to exasperate them more than the topic itself, it is being pestered about it by people like me.  (This, in itself, I find revealing.)  However, given your demonstrated tolerance for good faith disagreement and spirited debate, I trust you will indulge me in a few pages of comment on this subject – and why it is so incredibly important to us – all with the purpose of suggesting that your return from Shakespeare’s England would be an excellent opportunity to take up this topic on one of your shows.  (I have in mind something similar to the “debate” you had with William Hyland on the Sally Hemings affair.  There must be some way to put a “Jeffersonian” spin on this.  Enlightenment reason versus faith, perhaps?)

            So much has been written on this subject that it is difficult to summarize it in a few pages.  I will do my best.

            The case against Will Shaxper[1] – a man who is well-documented as having been a litigious grain merchant and probable shareholder in the Globe Theater – can be summarized as follows:  the author of the canon, whoever he was, must have been highly educated in numerous fields of study including the classics and the law (to name only two).  On the testimony of his writings, he must have been well-traveled, knowledgeable of Elizabethan court life and court politics, and familiar with aristocratic manners and pastimes.  After centuries of searching, not one shred of evidence has turned up to indicate that Will Shaxper ever (i) wrote anything in his own hand except six illegible signatures (with different spellings), (ii) owned a single book, (iii) attended any school of any kind, (iv) read or wrote in any foreign language, (v) had any knowledge or training in the law, (vi) interacted with any courtier of Elizabeth’s court, or (vii) traveled anywhere except on the road between London and Stratford.  His parents and his children signed documents with an “X” indicating they were illiterate.  And yet, we are expected to believe that in between these two generations of illiterates there blossomed the creator of modern English!  The orthodox explanation for all of this is just one word: “genius.”  But “genius” does not give a person the obscure knowledge that a dish of baked doves was a time-honored northern Italian gift (Merchant of Venice) as Mark Anderson puts it.  Knowledge like that comes only from life experience.

            A truly overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence has been amassed to suggest – I will not say “prove” – that “William Shakespeare” was the brilliantly-chosen nom de plume for the eccentric Elizabethan courtier Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.  (The brilliance of the pen-name is itself a fascinating point that I must pass over here.  Suffice it to say: the pen or “spear”, wielded or “shaken,” is mightier than the sword.)

Only a few highlights of the Oxfordian position are possible in this short space:

            De Vere’s maternal uncle and tutor, Arthur Golding, translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English.  Golding’s translation is alluded to so often in the canon that it has been called by many "Shakespeare’s favorite book."  Another of de Vere’s relatives, Henry Howard, invented the sonnet style we now refer to as “Shakespearean” (14 lines of iambic pentameter).  De Vere was highly educated and fluent in several languages – as we would expect the author of the canon to be.  He had access to all of the sources of Shakespeare’s plays (many of them not translated into English in his time).  He was trained in the law – an area of learning that provides such ready and fertile ground for metaphor in the plays.  He was one of the highest-ranking noblemen in the realm, occupying an earldom that dated to William the Conqueror in 1066.  He had intimate knowledge of the workings of Elizabeth’s court – satired with such ferocity in the plays.  He traveled extensively throughout Italy to the very cities featured in the plays.  (He was so enamored of Italy – where so many of the plays are set – that he was lampooned by his contemporaries as the “Italianate Englishman.”)  He was a documented lover and patron of literature and the theatre.  Some of his teenage poems survive.  They sound just like what you would expect the teenage “Shakespeare” to sound like.  Contemporary records indicate he was “among the best” writers of comedies, yet strangely, none of those comedies have survived under his own name.  The famous Ashbourne portrait of “Shakespeare” is very likely a portrait of Edward de Vere passed down to his descendants:

From the cover of "Shakespeare" By Another Name, by Mark Anderson.

             The above image contains two portraits known to be from Shakespeare's time.  On the left, is the so-called Ashbourne portrait of "Shakespeare."  On the right is a known portrait of Edward de Vere, painted circa 1575 when he was in his mid 20s.  The sitter of the Ashbourne portrait looks a few years older.  But are they not the same person?

            Perhaps most persuasively, events from de Vere’s well-documented life are retold so frequently in the plays that one could be forgiven for describing the Shakespearean canon as de Vere’s autobiography.  The authorship literature is chock full of examples, large and small.  Every newly discovered fact about de Vere’s life seems to show up somewhere in the plays or poems.  Simply put, there are many, many, many correspondences between his life and the canon and they cannot all be chalked up to “coincidence.”  Either Edward de Vere wrote these plays or someone with intimate knowledge of his life – the Warwickshire grain merchant Will Shaxper? – decided for some strange reason to make this eccentric courtier’s life the template for the greatest works in the English language.

            To the defenders of tradition, all of this is so much lunacy.  When they do stoop to address the matter at all, they often leave the impression that no Oxfordian scholar has ever made a single good point in defense of Oxford’s candidacy (or against Shaxper’s).  Check out any of the brief “biographies” of Shaxper that one finds in the most widely-used editions of the plays (e.g., Signet, Pelican, Folger, etc.).  The authorship question is briefly raised and quickly dismissed with accusations of “snobbery” (i.e., only a snob could think that only a nobleman could be a genius).  (The Oxfordian argument goes more like this: this particular genius sounds an awful lot like a certain nobleman.)

            The traditional attribution strikes me as having many of the hallmarks of a religious dogma.  It has its high priests (nowadays, more or less limited to the ivory tower and the Stratford souvenir peddlers), its holy shrine (Stratford) and its resistance to open inquiry (a tiny minority of English departments tolerate “authorship studies” – akin to teaching Darwinian evolution at Oral Roberts University).  What I would give to get someone like Harold Bloom in a room, tie him to a chair, and inject him with truth serum!  I find it impossible to believe that he would not at least admit that one or two Oxfordians have made one or two good points over the years.  And yet, in public, Professor Bloom condescendingly dismisses the whole topic as the “Oxfordian lunacy.”  Who is the snob?

            More and more, the argument one hears from the Stratfordians is that “it doesn’t matter” who wrote these plays.  It absolutely matters, Clay!  First, there is the simple notion of historical truth and justice.  Why would anyone want to be ignorant about the true identity of the greatest author in our language?  It matters.  And why would anyone want to deny the true author the immortality he deserves?  It matters.  We have good reason to believe that de Vere chaffed under the anonymity forced upon him by circumstances.[2]  If the penny-pinching Stratford burgher is not the true author, could there be a greater literary injustice than that he has worn the laurels earned by de Vere?  It matters, Clay.  It really matters.

            Also, if you don’t know the first thing about “William Shakespeare” – namely, who he was – how can you even begin to understand his works?  On a recent show you described Much Ado About Nothing as a “problem play.”  It is only a “problem” if you have the wrong author.  Read in light of de Vere’s known and documented life experiences, the play is easily understood as one of his many attempts to come to terms with his difficult marriage to Anne Cecil.  (Anne Cecil, by the way, was the daughter of William Cecil, Lord Burghley.  She was the model for Ophelia in Hamlet.  Lord Burghley, de Vere’s father-in-law, was the universally-acknowledged model for Polonius.  Is it a “coincidence” that Anne and Burghley were part of de Vere’s inner circle?  Does Shaxper have any known or documented connection to these people?)

            I cannot articulate the importance of getting Shakespeare right more succinctly than Mark Anderson did in the final paragraph of his book “Shakespeare” By Another Name:

In the final analysis, repatriating Edward de Vere’s life to the Shakespeare canon provides motivation behind the characters and plots, charts an artistic path intrinsic to the flawed but fascinating life of the artist, uncovers new levels of autobiographical meaning in the greatest works of English literature, and replaces the incomprehensible mystery of a deified genius with a comprehensible – if still incomparable – man who, for all his failures, became the very breath and soul of the English-speaking world.

            I am aware of the fallacy of using “arguments from authority” as logical proofs.  So I offer the following “Honor Roll of Skeptics” only to disprove the common slander that authorship skeptics are a bunch of lunatics and cranks:  John Adams, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir John Gielgud, Kenneth Branaugh, Justice John Paul Stevens, Justice William Brennan, and Justice Harry Blackmun – to name a few.  There are many, many more.

Hollywood has finally gotten around to telling this story with a blockbuster movie called “Anonymous” (due in theatres on September 30, 2011).  Roland Emmerich of “Independence Day” fame is the film’s director.  From the official trailer (available on YouTube), the movie looks typically overdone with distracting special effects and the like.  (Is CGI really needed to depict Elizabethan England?).  Worse, it appears the script will butcher the case for Oxford with speculative side-claims (e.g., Elizabeth I and de Vere were lovers).  Hollywood!  Despite it apparent flaws, I am very hopeful that this major motion picture will bring some much needed attention to this most important of historical “mysteries.”  I live with the hope that in my lifetime Edward de Vere will be universally recognized as the real-life man behind the pen-name “William Shakespeare.”

            Henry James once wrote:  “I am… haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.”  If Thomas Jefferson can doubt the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, surely we can join Henry James in doubting the divinity of William of Stratford.

                                                                                    Kindest regards,

P.S. We met very briefly in Salida, Colorado in September of 2010.  You were there performing Theodore Roosevelt.  Excellent!  I asked you about possibly coming to speak to Care & Share Food Bank about sustainable agriculture.  We may still reach out to you about this through your booking agent.  In any event, I hope to see you again sometime soon in Salida.

---

[1] It is interesting that the Stratford documents almost always spell the last name in a manner suggesting a “short a” pronunciation (e.g., Shaxper, Shagsper, Shackspere, Shakspere, etc.).

[2] Hamlet (dying):  O God Horatio, what a wounded name, things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world, draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.  Hamlet, Act V. Scene II (emphasis mine).

The Invisible Wall

When Harry Bernstein was born in an impoverished Lancashire mill town on May 30, 1910, most Europeans’ day-to-day lives had more in common with Londoners of Shakespeare’s time than with Americans of today.  And that’s really the first thing that hits you while reading this centenarian’s compelling memoir – or is it a novel? –  The Invisible Wall.  The story opens in 1914 on the eve of the First World War and runs through the early 1920s when the author and his family move to America.  It is a time before most people had indoor plumbing, garbage removal, electricity, cars, radios & televisions, or supermarkets.  Bernstein was born in the twilight years of the Gilded Age: on the other side of modern machine-based warfare, on the other side of the Russian Revolution, and on the other side of the violent and irrational ideologies that those two events spawned.  And yet this very different world existed within the lifetime of a still-living author.

             The main plot, however, centers around a phenomenon that is just as true today as it was then:  religion poisons everything.  (Shout out to the immortal Hitch.) The “invisible wall” of the book’s title refers to an imaginary boundary line that runs down the middle of a single street in a poor neighborhood – a wall that keeps the formerly Russian and Polish Jews on one side of the street and the Christians on the other.

The wall is strong but not impermeable.  On Friday nights, for example, the Jewish families hire a “fire goy” – a Christian neighbor who comes over and tends to their fireplaces.  Tending a fire was forbidden to Jews on the Shabbos.  Armistice Day, as another example, became an occasion for mingling and genuine good will between the two communities.  But on most days, for most people, religious bigotry was the order of the day.

            As a long oppressed minority, the Jews suffer the worst of it.  But the bigotry and fear of “the other” definitely run both ways.  And very intensely, it turns out.  When ‘arry’s oldest sister Lily falls in love with a Christian lad named Arthur, and worse, marries him in a secret secular ceremony, their mother is required by her religious faith to regard Lily as dead.  Not just disowned, which would be bad enough, but dead.  She actually goes into formal ritualized mourning, something called “sitting shiva,” which involves seven days of sitting and praying in a darkened room in her stocking feet.  Her Jewish neighbors, equally appalled by this horrifying turn of events, visit her in her mourning state as if comforting a woman whose daughter had been burned in the flames of the Spanish Inquisition.

            The birth of Lily and Arthur’s child, after some initial reluctance, finally brings a lukewarm reconciliation to the two families.  They even manage to throw a block party in celebration of the event.  This leads to a single day of reveling on which the two sides of the street find themselves drinking, dancing & socializing together.  Bernstein leaves no room for doubt, however, that all this happy-go-lucky getting along is short-lived.  In an epilogue, he describes his return to the neighborhood in the early 1960s.  Only one of his old neighbors is still living there.  In fact, the neighborhood is about to be bulldozed to make room for a new public housing project.  That neighbor, a Christian named Anna Greene, describes how, after ‘arry moved to America in 1922, not much really changed in the neighborhood.  The invisible wall continued to separate the neighbors into opposing communities of religious suspicion and fear.  

            If our age is more enlightened and tolerant, it is not easy to see.  At least the Jews and Christians on Harry Bernstein’s street were capable of kindness towards each other in dire circumstances.  Today’s newspapers are full of uninspiring examples of our intolerance:  preachers burning the Koran, right-wing evangelists pushing their faith on Jews at the Air Force Academy, demonstrations against Islamic Centers in New York, banning the burkha in France, and on and on.  Just this week, Time magazine offers a feature piece on an up and coming mega-church evangelical preacher who is teaching his flock to reject notions of eternal punishment and hell.  The responses of most right-wing Christians to his warmly titled book Love Wins have not been, shall we say, ecumenical.

Want to be really appalled?  Check out CNN’s documentary Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door: 

Once again, religion poisons everything.

The Second Coming

In August 1914, the supremacy of Western civilization was taken for granted by most Europeans –  kings and commoners alike.  Over a period of four centuries, Western man had watched his culture, technology, religion and manners spread across the entire globe.  Before the First World War, few doubted that the people of this little continent, sprouting off the Asian landmass like an unruly weed, would continue to dominate world affairs and convert non-Western peoples to Western ways of living and thinking.

In 1919, looking back on the recent carnage of the First World War, the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats penned one of his most well known works – The Second Coming – a dark meditation on what it must feel like to witness the final days of a golden era.  Over a period of four years, the West nearly committed suicide, and in the process, discovered the dark side of its celebrated scientific and industrial prowess.  When it was all over, Europeans lost much more than millions of their young men.  They also lost the sunny optimism and confidence that had been central to their worldview.  Violent and irrational ideologies like fascism and communism captured the European imagination, displaced the pre-war liberal consensus, and led directly to the even greater carnage of the Second World War.

The psychological trauma of modern machine-based war permeates every line of The Second Coming.  In the first stanza, Yeats laments what the war had done to Western society.  There is a palpable feeling of futility and hopelessness, as if the human race has finally proven itself incapable of maintaining enlightened civilization:  “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 full of passionate intensity.”

In Christian theology, the “second coming” refers to the return of Jesus Christ to the Earth during the “end times” and the establishment of a New Jerusalem.  This is understood by Christians as a glorious moment in history.  Indeed, it represents the end of history.  In the second stanza of the poem, Yeats alters this traditional conception of “the second coming” and describes the awakening of a monstrous beast – in the form of a sphinx (body of a lion; head of a man) – whose coming symbolizes the beginning of a new dark period of human history.

Yeats ends the poem with a question:  “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”  It is a question we might paraphrase as follows:  How will our own comfortable age end?  Nuclear holocaust? Environmental catastrophe?  Financial collapse? A Third World War?  Writing in 1919, Yeats was apparently haunted by a premonition that the end of the world was at hand, or at the very least, that a new terrible age was dawning.  For all too many (for example the six million victims of the Nazi Holocaust), his dark prophecy proved true.

Like any great work of art, Yeats’ poem speaks to something universal and timeless.  Without to much difficulty, one can imagine St. Augustine reading – and being moved by – The Second Coming as Roman civilization collapses around him and he flees for safety from the barbarian hordes invading from the north.  The poem also captures what probably millions of Americans felt in the first days and weeks following September 11, 2001 – a feeling that anarchy had been loosed upon the world. 

Yeats’ vivid imagery continues to terrify as we consider new nuclear threats from “somewhere in the sands of the desert” (Iran?).  For him, the apocalypse comes not from any inherent malevolence in the universe but from the complacency of the many (“the best lack all conviction”) in failing to deal with an energized minority who are “full of passionate intensity.”  When we consider the “passionate intensity” of radical Islam, The Second Coming becomes both prophecy and warning.

The Second Coming, by W.B. Yeats (1919)

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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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?

 

Interesting Times

“May you live in interesting times.”  So goes the ancient Chinese proverb.  More accurately, this was the first part of a three-part curse.

We do seem to be living in interesting times.  Revolutionary instability is sweeping the region of the world on which Americans are utterly dependent for the continued flow of the resource to which they are utterly addicted and to which they feel utterly entitled to consume without limit.  The relatively peaceful protests in Tunisia and Egypt have given way to violent and bloody crack-downs in Bahrain, Iran and Libya.  Iran has just moved naval ships through the Suez Canal -- something it has not done since our stooge the "Shah" was in power.  Time Magazine’s website reported on Tuesday that Libyan leader “Colonel” Qaddafi has ordered his security forces to blow up pipelines that provide oil to the Mediterranean region (as thousands of Libyan protesters are said to be marching on Tripoli from other Libyan cities).  The elephant in the living room of all this is Saudi Arabia.  The New York Times reports this morning that the Oil Kingdom is losing its regional influence to Iran.  The Saudi regime is thought to be far more repressive and hated by its religiously fundamentalist people than any other regime in the region.  If that place boils over in revolution, or its oil infrastructure is sabotaged in any way, then bend over, grab your ankles, and get ready for $10 per gallon gasoline and economic chaos unlike anything seen in our lifetimes.  When that happens, expect the "drill baby drill" crowd to scream for an invasion of the entire Middle East.

At home, we have an oil-dependent economy on life-support.  It’s an economy that is mostly based on gambling (casinos, state lotteries, and the financial markets), entertainment, debt-fueled instant gratification, planned techno-obsolesce (i.e., buying the new and improved version of each electronic geegwaw every year), military spending, and incremental improvements to the speed at which teenagers can wirelessly disseminate nude photos of themselves.  Personal, corporate and governmental debt-levels are crushing and unsustainable.  American politics is dominated by loud mouths, whiners, frauds and hypocrites.  Our collective heads are so far up our collective asses in denial that we cannot even think straight about our predicament much less respond intelligently to it.  Much less consider changing the way we live or accepting a lower standard of living, say, something closer to what an upper middle class small town banker enjoyed in the 1950s.  As Dick Cheney once famously said, the American standard of living is “non-negotiable.”

Consider NASCAR.  Here is a "sport" whose existence depends on the gratuitous pissing-away (at 200 mph) of the one diminishing resourse that is so essential to our car-dependent utopia that we're willing to invade other countries to ensure we have access to it.  Every year, millions of people gratuitously piss-away millions more gallons of gas driving hundreds of miles to watch these noisy smelly machines drive around in a circle for three hours.  (Can't one get the same basic experience standing on a freeway overpass?)  Is there any better example of how far our heads are lodged up our asses than the wild popularity of NASCAR?

By the way, here are the other two parts of that ancient Chinese curse:

May you come to the attention of the authorities.

May you find what you are looking for. 

That last one might be re-stated for today’s times as follows: Be careful what you wish for . . . you just might get it.  Americans’ most ardent wish seems to be to protect at all costs the oil-dependent standard living to which they’ve become accustomed and to which they feel entitled.  As the Middle East’s fragile stability continues to crumble, things should get very, well, interesting.