Anybody notice how the Biden era is starting to resemble that W.B. Yeats poem?

In 1973, I took my brand-new G.I. Bill to school. 

Having an affinity for the language, I started off thinking I’d pursue a career in letters.  My second semester in English Literature disabused me of the delusion. 

It was a small summer session class.  The professor appeared to be more interested in the breasts of one of my classmates than imparting any of his deep insight on to the five of us in the class.  It appeared that he had assigned the grades to each of us within the first week of class.  While I can only speculate who was the A student, I know I was the designated C.

Compounding matters, we studied people like W.B. Yeats.  His mystical visions were head scratchers for me in 1973. 

However, lately one his poems has returned to haunt me.  His line in The Second Coming sounds like a news report from the impeachment hearings:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

In fact, it describes the Uniparty world of D.C. to a tee.

The first stanza is full of other useful revelations:

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.

 

Things fall apart.  Did he foresee Boeing imploding?  Or was he referring to the shameful condition of the roads in places like California?

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.  Drowned the sea of transmania?

There’s only one more stanza to the poem.  You might find it enlightening if not reassuring. 

Oh, by the way, Yeats and his pal, Oswald Spengler of Decline of the West fame, foresaw the west collapsing and succumbing to a rising China.  Not a bad call for more than a century ago.

What became of my academic career?  The summer of ’73 sent me fleeing to the sciences.  In those days they made every effort to be objective.

Image: Picryl, via Wikimedia Commons // public domain