This came to mind this morning:
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats
1865 –1939
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?
Source: https://poets.org/poem/second-coming
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And here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1j0j4r_gnw
Beautifully read. And very, very, apt. Sadly, it just brings home how far down the road to authoritarianism we are in the UK.
In the US this is point blank, in your face, obvious. It cannot be denied and anyone who supports Trump is, by definition, an enemy of US democracy – however imperfect that may be.
But in the UK we’re actually worse off. For democracy here has been slowly drained out of our lives. A drip, drip, with, at times, a quickening of the flow. But always stealthily enough for far too few to notice; for warning to be easily ignored; for apparently plausible excuses to be offered. The waters have never been deep or dark enough to cause alarm: to make enough people wake up and fight back.
But now, of course, and as was inevitable, we’re up to our necks. And soon we’ll be gasping for air, as the last vestiges of the oxygen that democracy provides for civic, social, economic, political and cultural life of this country – despite it’s faults – is completely captured by the few, and controlled according to their authoritarian tendencies.
To return to the words of poets, Dylan Thomas once wrote: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.’ Those words – always so powerful – were written about dying and death. But they are no less apt when applied to our democracy and what it been subjected to by successive governments in the UK ever since Thatcher.
And so I think we know where the US and UK are heading, with very little that I can see to stop that. So, forget Greenland and Canada. Trump/the US, get the UK as their 51st state for free.
There are some obvious questions that therefore come to mind: when do most of our European neighbours, and the likes of Canada (in particular), Australia, etc deem that the “pollution” that spews from the US/UK is too much for their democracies to take? At what point will Trump openly align with Putin? And, then, will the government in the UK actually make a stand? Or will they, as now, follow the US lead for the supposed economic benefits of being in an authoritarian alliance? Currently, the answer to that last question would be yes.
I agree with you.
And very well written.
Thanks you.
And I watched the pieces you recommended – again worth it. How long is it before MSNBC is silenced? I know the moves are afoot.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
I’ve always assumed Yeats meant Hitler.
This was written in 1919 I think, post WW1. Hitler was not known yet. Yeats was witnessing what was happening in Ireland and ugly divides that would, he thought, go wider. He was right.
The centre can never hold until sufficient human beings develop their social intelligence to the point of realising the only way we can optimise our well-being is by copying bacterial life forms and extend ourselves to receive the help of others and do the same for them wherever we can. This is Nature’s 101 !
https://ankara.lti.cs.cmu.edu/11780/sites/default/files/BacterialLinguisticsandSocialIntelligence.pdf
The beast crawling its way to Bethlehem is the new dark age.
A most compelling poem, as is the Dylan Thomas poem mentioned by Ivan.
Things are slowly falling apart which seems to be part of someone’s plan or design. I’ve heard this referred to as slowly boiling a frog, although I doubt very much if anyone would ever do such a thing. It’s painless but lethal apparently. I could think of better metaphors.
The more we hear from the USA, the more we see this design unfolding backed by people who must be megalomaniac or maga maniacs. I would call it fascism, pure and simple.
I follow James O’Brien on LBC and he has been heralding all this creeping totalitarianism since the madness of brexit. He is now openly describing it as fascism.
He has, it seems, and at last, seen through Starmer.