POETRY AS PROPHECY -- SLOUCHING TOWARD NOVEMBER
"Who says poets can't be prophets? He had the whole 20th century figured out in advance. Wow."
So wrote my law school roommate on Facebook three days ago.
The "he" was William Butler Yeats.
The prophecy was The Second Coming.
So I re-read the poem.
And wrote back to my roommate . . .
"Maybe he had this one figured out too."
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre," wrote Yeats in 1919, "the falcon cannot hear the falconer".
By the time he wrote these words, Yeats himself was an accomplished Irish poet and playwright. In the years thereafter, he also became a politician, serving in the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928. In that capacity, he combined the Irish nationalism to which he became committed with the Protestant Ascendency in which he had been raised to warn his newly created Free State brethren that "If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the north . . . You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation." He was right about this but the Free State did not listen.
In 1919, Yeats obviously could not know that Nazis would overrun middle Europe twenty years later or that Stalin and Mao would, along with Hitler, kill millions in the service of either a false historic materialism (Stalin and Mao) or a xenophobic racism (Hitler). He did, however, understand that for any civilization to survive, the "centre" had to hold. This was true for his Ireland and for Russia in the first two decades of the 20th century, just as it would be true for Germany in the 1930s and '40s and for China thereafter.
Yeats also recognized the sign that presages any collapse of the centre:
For Yeats, a mystic and lover of Irish mythology, the centre had a spiritual element to it. In holding, it keeps things together. But it isn't glue. It is more like gravity. Though it does not bind the surrounding parts forever to each other, it at least creates a field in which they tend to stick together. In politics, it makes pluralism possible because it creates space for negotiation and compromise. Like gravity, however, it can be disrupted. And also like gravity, when it is disrupted the consequences can be cataclysmic.
The rest of the poem is a meditation on the nature of that cataclysm.
It could be the promised "Second Coming".
Or, more likely, the "blank and pitiless" sphinx.
A little more than a month before the Presidential election on November 5, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance engaged in a ninety-minute Vice Presidential Debate last night sponsored by CBS News. Because neither one of them is Donald Trump, the debate had all the trappings of a normal pre-Trump political contest. No one screamed or yelled. No insults were levelled. The back and forth was polite. Both candidates answered (or didn't) the questions put to them and confined their responses to the agreed upon time limits.
To the experts, the pundits, the commentators and the sundry and various who make their living fly specking these things, there weren't a lot of surprises. A CNN instant poll had Vance narrowly exceeding expectations, unsurprising in view of how bad his roll out has been since the GOP convention in July. And because he in particular is not Trump, a number of his jaw dropping inventions -- that Trump "salvaged Obamacare" (he tried to kill it) or that Vance himself did not support a national abortion ban (he did, and more than once) or that illegal firearms are coming into the US from Mexico (they aren't) or that the Haitian immigrants in Ohio are not there legally (they are) -- could have been easily lost on anyone who does not make a living paying attention.
The most jaw-dropping moment came at the end when the debate turned to the issue of democracy, Trump's election denialism and the violence of January 6.
One after another, Vance either soft peddled Trump's lies, invented new ones of his own, or just refused to answer.
Asked point blank whether he would "seek to challenge this year's election results" even if -- as was the case in 2020 -- "every Governor certifies the results", Vance falsely claimed that "all" he and Trump have "said is there were problems in 2020" and "we should debate those issues peacefully". Accused point blank of "deny[ing] what happened on January 6" when his running mate became "the first . . . President [who] tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power", he resorted to phony outrage. "Yeah, well, look Tim," he complained, "it's really rich for Democratic leaders to say Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January 20th, as we have done for 250 years".
Finally there was this:
"Walz: Did [Trump] lose the 2020 election?
Vance: Tim, I'm focused on the future . . .
Walz: That is a damning non-answer."
For me in those final moments, all of Vance's polished prose evaporated. Instead, he stood on America's stage exposed as no better than the fraud at the top of the GOP ticket and maybe even worse.
The problem here is that Vance knows better. He knows Trump lost the 2020 election. He knows there was no significant fraud. He knows Trump can't pretend to have advocated peaceful protest on January 6 when for hours he refused to stop the violence. He knows Vice President Pence did the right thing when he refused to deny the certified vote count or pretend that fake electors were legitimate. And he knows that, in saying he would have done what Pence refused to do, he is enabling Trump's continuing lie and undermining the sine qua non of American democracy.
This last flaw is his saddest.
Vance is the child of a recovering addict. As the child of a recovered alcoholic myself, I empathize with him. Because the one trait we share, other than having graduated from Yale Law School, is that we were both enablers. It doesn't work. It makes any addictive dysfunction worse, not better. Trump is addicted to himself. Like all drunks and druggies, he is in denial. Helping him stay there is not good for him. And making him President (again) will be worse for us.
Whether any of this will change the minds of those who say they will vote for Trump is anyone's guess.
Sadly, however, probably not is more likely than maybe so.
Because . . .
Vance is not alone in his "passionate intensity".
The Republican Party that embraces Trump and excommunicates any critics; the Supreme Court that left him on the ballot and then clothed him with immunity; the Senate that refused to convict him; the right- wing media that supports him; even the establishment media that "sanewashes" him or sacrifices truth for some false notion of objectivity . . .
All helped orchestrate the centre's collapse.
What comes next?
In 1919, Yeats did not know.
But he did not think it would be pretty.
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