Still another example – as if any more were needed – of why we have police
Consider the alternative: vigilante “justice”.
Those who think otherwise are either fools or knaves or both – that is, stupid or evil or both.
At some point – perhaps after the police are gone or totally corrupt and corrupted – people may reflect back on how it used to be in the days when police were trained to avoid unnecessary killings, and when although such killings occurred they were exceedingly rare considering the number of times police encountered violent, resistant people.
Police work isn’t easy, and that’s the understatement of the year. Police will sometimes make errors. Some police will do even worse; they will be corrupt or racist or stupid or any number of other things. But considering how tough the job is, and how many police there are, that number is extremely small. Without them, we are back to a state of nature. And the nature is the state described by Hobbes, not Rousseau.
One of the best courses I ever took was one that made me read both Hobbes and Rousseau in tandem. I think it was in college. It might have been in high school.
Hobbes wrote in 1651:
…Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). The description contains what has been called one of the best-known passages in English philosophy, which describes the natural state humankind would be in, were it not for political community:
“In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In such a state, people fear death and lack both the things necessary to commodious living, and the hope of being able to obtain them. So, in order to avoid it, people accede to a social contract and establish a civil society.
The social contract has been broken, or at least is in the process of being broken. For a long time we have stood on the shoulders of giants, the great thinkers of Western Civilization. But now apparently we are tired and seem intent on jumping off.
“Enough is enough” – and so what?
Here’s an article that’s well worth reading. Towards the end the author says that if you think that things have gone too far – that wokeness has become “a danger to the traditional American understanding of civic law and liberty” – you need to do more than say it, and more than vote in November:
But obviously, voting in November is no real response at all. If “enough” is truly enough, then simply resolving to take the trouble to cast a vote in November seems wholly inadequate to countering the excesses of the Left. Donald Trump can’t stop this. Only the citizens who have had “enough” can do it. Voting isn’t enough.
My friend from Texas was right to ask me: “Adam, have you reached your [breaking] point? What are your public actions?” Well, of course, I vote. My writing—essays like the one you’re reading—are one way that I try to combat the zealots. As a teacher, I don’t adopt any “antiracist pedagogies.” But I do teach the tradition of Western thought, and I stress that taking this tradition seriously will equip my students with the most effective means of fighting racism. I speak out on campus—when I feel that doing so might be effective. I give some money to organizations that I believe might effectively counter the Left’s assault on America. I could probably do more though. And you probably can, too.
When you’ve answered Lindsey’s question (if you can answer it—and if you can’t, you’re with the mob on the road to Utopia, come hell or high water—probably the former) ask yourself the next question: “Well? What am I going to do about it?” A friend on my chat (referring to my comments) cautioned the others, saying to be wary of people suggesting you must do X, Y, or Z. I’m not asking anyone to do X, Y, or Z.
If you have had “enough,” I’m asking that you do something. Ask yourself: given my own gifts and my own limitations, how can I contribute? For all of us, this will require some sacrifice. This means you also have to consider what, specifically, you are willing and able to sacrifice. But if you’re unwilling to sacrifice anything—if you’re unwilling to respond in any way other than casting a ballot—then it doesn’t matter what you say: you haven’t had enough.
I know what I do, although it feels inadequate: I write for public consumption, and I’ve been doing it for over 15 years for many many hours a day. During past elections, I’ve done some phone-banking, which I found a waste of time. I did a little demonstrating about ten years ago. I used to do a lot of talking to people I knew, trying to persuade, but that did nothing except frustrate me. However, I’ve been taking that up again lately, although I’m not at all sure if it will have any better effect this go-round.
I have said before, and I’ll say again: whether or not Trump is elected in 2020, the problem is huge and will remain huge. This is indeed, as that linked article says, about a lot more than this election. Sometimes I think that if the election is lost, the forces of the left will have won. Sometimes I think they have already won. And sometimes I think that’s just my tendency to pessimism, and that it is an attitude that must be fought against with great vigor.
It’s official. Apparently, Justice Roberts has been missing Justice Stevens so much…
…that he has decided to become him.
There’s some interesting legal reasoning from Roberts in the case, which struck down a Louisiana law requiring abortionists to have hospital admitting privileges. Roberts was relying on precedent:
“The legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike,” Roberts wrote in a concurring opinion. “The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”
What’s he’s saying there is that the Louisiana law was almost exactly the same as a Texas law which had been declared unconstitutional by the Court in 2016, and therefore absent some sort of unusual circumstances the present case had to be decided in accord with the previous one. And yet, in that 2016 case, Justice Roberts had voted against declaring the Texas law unconstitutional. Now he is saying, essentially, that he is required by precedent to vote against himself – not to mention against the legislature of the state of Louisiana. And this is the same Justice Roberts who just the other day had no problem whatsoever overturning precedent to find that “sex” means something quite different, legally, than it has in the past.
Justice Thomas remarked on today’s ruling and pointed out the liberal wing’s (and I include Roberts there) situational and shifting allegiance to precedent:
The plurality and THE CHIEF JUSTICE ultimately cast aside this jurisdictional barrier to conclude that Louisiana’s law is unconstitutional under our precedents. But those decisions created the right to abortion out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text.
Absolutely true. The proper way to have gone about making abortion legal would have been to have an amendment to the Constitution, or to just accomplish it state by state. Instead, the Court reached deep into its creative inspiration and created a federal right that did not previously exist and had no foundation in the Constitution.
[ADDENDUM: Much more here.]
Defending our history
This is the kind of New Yorker I remember from my youth. You didn’t mess with them. The young man doesn’t quite know what hit him:
Somewhere I read that the lady in the video is named Vickie Paladino, and she’s a well-known activist on the right in New York City. Not a job for the faint-hearted. She ran for state office in 2018 and the local Republican Party (there is one?) didn’t support her:
On Aug. 28, Queens GOP Chairwoman Joann Ariola came to the QNS office in Bayside to voice the party’s concerns about State Senate District 11 Republican candidate Vickie Paladino, who is running against GOP-endorsed candidate Simon Minching in the primary.
Ariola pointed out several areas of concern the party has with Paladino, including her tax records, her affiliation with fringe political groups, her behavior on social media and past remarks she has made at campaign events.
“Vickie Paladino represents everything that we are not,” Ariola said.
The party’s distaste with Paladino dates back to her involvement in Bo Dietl’s independent mayoral campaign in 2017. Paladino first joined Dietl’s campaign after a video of her shouting at Mayor Bill de Blasio after a press conference in Whitestone went viral.
Once she began working for Dietl, Paladino was asked numerous times to delete Facebook posts that were offensive, John Haggerty of the Queens County GOP claimed, and her personal Twitter account was eventually shut down. Haggerty accompanied Ariola to her visit with the QNS office.
Since launching her own political campaign, Paladino has created a new Twitter account that was briefly suspended this year for reasons unclear. On Facebook, some of her supporters have spread anti-Semitic and borderline racist speech on her page, as seen in screen shots shared by Ariola. Haggerty remarked that Paladino’s failure to denounce these supporters is “disgusting.”
Paladino actually defeated Minching in the primary, but lost by a tremendous margin in the election. This was pretty much a foregone conclusion, if you look at the recent history of elections in that district, won by Democrats with an overwhelming margin. As for the supposedly racist and anti-Semitic comments by supporters, it’s certainly possible, but the article doesn’t show them nor does it have links to them, so I don’t know what their content was.
But the left only dislikes anti-Semitism when they can pin it on the right. Otherwise, it’s all good.
The following incident may have been the start of Paladino’s political career. Note that she asks of that de Blasio, “Why did you stand with the Communists, with the anarchists, with the socialists?” Good question, even back in 2017 when she asked it, and even more so now:
Making the acquaintance of the Periodic Table
[NOTE: This is a slightly revised repeat of a previous post – and today’s attempt to get away from politics.]
When I was in junior high school, there was a large poster of the Periodic Table of the Elements that hung in the science classroom in front of a little-used blackboard spanning the right side of the room, next to where I sat.
I’m not sure whether anybody in the junior high ever learned what the chart was about—we certainly didn’t. But it was a grim reminder of what awaited us in high school, when we’d be required to take Chemistry and Physics and Geometry and Trigonometry and a bunch of other subjects that sounded Hard, and sounded like An Awful Lot of Work.
I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. In my more bored moments in class (and I had quite a few of them) I would glance at that chart on the wall and idly ponder its arcane mysteries. It looked like a more old-fashioned and slightly yellowing version of this:
That chart was the sort of thing that made me nearly sick to my stomach whenever I looked at it, something like slide rules and drawings of the innards of the internal combustion engine, and the long rows of monotonous monochromatic law books in my father’s office.
But then time passed—as time often does—and I found myself a junior in high school, sitting in chemistry class and finally and reluctantly about to penetrate the secrets of the Periodic Table. The teacher, a small, elderly (oh, he must have been at least fifty), enthusiastic, spry man, explained it to us.
I sat awestruck as I took in what he was saying. That chart may have looked boring, but it demonstrated something so absolutely astounding that I could hardly believe it was true. The world of the elements at the atomic level was spectacularly orderly, with such grandeur, power, and rightness that I could only think of one term for it, and that was “beautiful.”
I did very well in chemistry, and even thought of majoring in it in college, although in the end I stuck to psychology and anthropology. But I never forgot the lesson of the Periodic Table – although actually, it taught many lessons, and some of them I did forget. But the one I remembered most was that appearances can be deceptive, and that what lies beneath a bland and stark exterior can be a world of magic.
And now I’ve finally discovered a Periodic Table worth its salt—or, rather, its sodium chloride. Take a look at this, a Periodic Table nearly as lovely as the elemental wonders it illustrates (click on the photo to enlarge):
And then you might say with Keats:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
I’m not sure it’s all ye need to know. But I know that the Periodic Table became beautiful to me.
You might want to…
…take part in this event at Legal Insurrection tomorrow evening at 8 Eastern Time.
Glenn Loury on how we’re being swept along by hysteria about racism in America
Recommended, especially the first half hour or so:
The game of telephone and the difference between “enjoy” and “great”
Last night I was watching a YouTube video by Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying. Weinstein is the guy who defied the Evergreen crowd a while back. He’s on the left but with a strong libertarian streak. One thing in particular struck me: towards the end, Weinstein (no Trump admirer, to say the least) says that Tucker Carlson (whom I know has been ragging on Trump lately) quotes Trump as having said he’s enjoying watching the blue cities implode, and that’s why he’s not stopping it.
Here’s the passage; it’s short:
When I heard that, I thought it would be a pretty dumb thing for Trump to say, but I also wondered why I hadn’t heard about it before if indeed that’s what he said. How had I happened to miss it? So I did a search (on Google initially) and couldn’t find it; the closest I came was something quite different, part of the speech Trump gave to the crowd at the Tulsa rally [emphasis mine]:
And we did something in Minneapolis after watching for three or four days, I called, I said, “You got to get … you can’t protect yourselves.” I got them to take 8,000 National Guardsmen. And in one hour it all ended and they rode through the next three weeks with no problem.
And we did the same thing in other cities. But how about Seattle? Isn’t that great? So they take over a big chunk of a city called Seattle. I mean, we’re not talking about some little place, we’re talking about Seattle. Have you ever been to Seattle? They took over a big chunk and the governor, who’s radical left, all of these places I talk about are Democrat, you know that, every one of them, every one of them. And I’d have an offer out, I said, “Anytime you want we’ll come in, we’ll straighten it out in one hour or less.” Now I may be wrong, but it’s probably better for us to just watch that disaster.
I flew in with some of our great congressmen, who we’re going to introduce it a second. And I said to them, “Congressmen, what do you think? I can straighten it out fast, should we just go in? No, sir. Let it simmer for a little while. Let people see what radical left Democrats will do to our country.” But Americans have watched left wing radicals, burn down buildings, loot businesses, destroy private property, injure hundreds of dedicated police offices.
Nothing there about enjoying watching anything – just that people need to see the horrible things that leftists do, so they will learn. And when he says “it’s probably better for us to just watch that disaster,” Trump is talking specifically about the “big chunk” of Seattle known as CHAZ or CHOP, and calling it a “disaster.”
After quite a bit more searching (including DuckDuckGo, which I generally find to be superior not only in privacy but in efficiency) I was able find the source for what Tucker Carlson had said. Here’s the Carlson quote that Weinstein was supposedly repeating:
On Friday, Vince Coglianese of “The Daily Caller” interviewed Donald Trump in the White House. Coglianese asked the president why he hasn’t sent federal troops to stop the chaos in cities like Seattle. Here’s what the president answered: “Right now, I think it’s great sitting back and watching this catastrophe.”
We understand the point he was making. These are liberal cities, and they’re destroying themselves. Their policies don’t work. This is what you get when you vote for liberals.
But it’s still the wrong answer.
So the word “enjoy” was never used. Trump said “great,” and it was clear that he meant that the greatness lay in enabling people to see what the left does when it is in control. Carlson also says that Trump was referring to “cities like Seattle.” But actually, at least in the Tulsa speech, Trump was referring specifically to the small CHAZ section of Seattle.
But that’s just Carlson’s paraphrase/quote. What about the original of what Trump said? The speech in Tulsa didn’t seem to be it, because Carlson is referring to a Daily Caller interview. It took further searching on DuckDuckGo to find it. It still is not a transcript, though; it’s selected quotes from an interview. But here it is [emphasis mine]:
In recent days, Trump has urged Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to deploy National Guard troops to retake CHAZ and said that he himself “will take care of it” if Inslee fails to act. The president said Monday that he had discussed the situation with Attorney General Bill Barr. When asked by the Caller what Barr is “advising” him to do, POTUS answered, “right now, I think it’s great sitting back and watching this catastrophe.”
So here again we have the same important detail that’s been left out by both Carlson and Weinstein: Trump appears to only be talking about the specific situation in CHAZ/CHOP when he says “it’s great sitting back.” Unlike what Carlson suggests, Trump is not talking about the wholesale destruction that has gone on and is going on in various cities around the country. And he calls CHAZ a “catastrophe.” So the interview remark is almost identical to the one in his Tulsa speech (where he says it’s a “disaster”); he’s quite consistent.
More quotes from the Daily Caller article [emphasis mine]:
The Caller asked, if [Trump] indeed isn’t currently planning on intervening, why continue with the tweets and statements indicating he would do so.
“Well, because we can do it anytime we want,” Trump answered. “But when I watch, it’s showing how bad that city system of government is because they’re all leftist Democrats running all these places that have these problems.”
“Seattle’s a disaster,” he continued. “Minneapolis has been a disaster, and you know if I didn’t strongly tell them, ‘get the National Guard in there,’ Minneapolis would still be under siege.”
Again, Trump suggested Inslee “should be able to take care of it very easily, but he’s a radical left too.”
“The amazing thing is though that, think of it, they allow it to happen, and they’re actually considering ‘isn’t it a wonderful thing?’ I watched last night where store owners, their stores have been taken away, their livelihood has been destroyed.”
That’s a rather sloppily written passage, which is not unusual these days. I’d rather have heard the actual interview in full, of course, but it appears that the discussion from Trump was going back and forth between the specific situation in CHAZ/CHOP and then the situation in the other cities and then back to CHAZ/CHOP. Also, the only people praising it and calling it “wonderful,” according to Trump, are the leftist Democrats in charge of places like Seattle, where the mayor had praised CHAZ/CHOP and so had the press. So if anyone is “enjoying” it, according to Trump, it’s them.
I’m nitpicking about this because it’s a fractal of the way we get our news these days – a game of telephone that ends up misinforming us. We go from Trump’s words to the Daily Caller’s excerpts, and then from them to Carlson’s remarks on them, and on to Bret Weinstein’s misquote of Carlson and the original quote.
What’s more, Carlson’s on the right, and Weinstein is at least somewhat sympathetic to the right’s position on this. What the left does with Trump quotes is far worse. Plus, it took me at least an hour to begin to get to the bottom of it, and I still haven’t found a transcript of the entire interview with Trump, which I’d much prefer to see. Who knows what the Daily Caller did or didn’t leave out?
Weinstein is a man who tries to be careful with his words and with whom I often (although certainly not always) agree. Here he’s speaking in a podcast that, ironically, is about the power of words to mislead. If you watch the whole thing, you’ll see Weinstein and Heying have some interesting things to say about the subject. And yet Weinstein ends up misquoting Carlson and thus Trump, and although Carlson himself has quoted Trump properly, he has misstated the context somewhat in terms of how general or specific it was.
I don’t think there’s any way to stop this sort of thing except to be aware of the fact that it happens constantly. It seems to be in the nature of human communication, which almost inevitably involves a lot of miscommunication, some of it purposeful but some of it unintentional (for example, I doubt Weinstein was aware of or intended his error, but it may have occurred anyway because he seems to detest Trump).
Karl Popper said it best, perhaps:
Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.
That said, Trump often speaks in a kind of telegraphese that makes it somewhat easy to misunderstand him, especially for someone who hates him to begin with.
And by the way, I looked for a site that would give that Popper quote in its larger context so that I could better understand exactly what Popper was saying and why. But you’re probably not surprised to learn I couldn’t find it.
To make men free
The NY Times and the left (but I repeat myself) would have you believe that America’s founding principle of the most basic kind was slavery, and that all along slavery and racism have been the driving forces behind the US.
I’m not a Christian, as I’ve said many times before. But I went to school in ancient times, when Christianity was talked about in public schools without any sense of irony or distaste. We also had to memorize the Battle Hymn of the Republic—and I mean four stanzas of it (minus the third one; see this). Because I was rather good at memorizing poetry and lyrics, I still remember it, and these words (in bold) from the 4th stanza as we learned it came to mind recently, for obvious reasons I think:
In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom
That transfigures you and me;
As He died to make men holy,
Let us die to make men free;
While God is marching on.
Those lines are a statement—written in 1861 by Julia Ward Howe and adopted as an anthem by the Union soldiers—of one of the explicit reasons men fought for the North during the Civil War. They were willing to die (and many of them did) to “make men free.”
Yes, there were other reasons and other issues in that war. But freeing the slaves was a big one of them.
Also:
During the Civil War, the “Battle Hymn” became a rallying cry of the northern cause, reprinted a million times, and sung on a thousand marches.
I find the Times more repugnant than I can express in words. And of course, the sentiment of the Times is now abroad in the land.
It’s only a small group, really, making the trouble. So why is it being allowed to wreak havoc? Two reasons. The first is that this group – let’s call them the Blue Guard – call their opposition “racists,” which apparently has become a magic word of such power that it blocks any action from those thus labeled, through the use of two psychological mechanisms: guilt (of the white variety in particular) and fear.
The second is that they have the support of most of the large institutions of our present society: the MSM, academia (where much of this originated and is disseminated), the Democratic Party, the entertainment and sports worlds, and large corporations.
I don’t think most people agree with what’s going on right now. But to resist it requires a person to ignore all those pressures brought to bear by the above groups, which control the bulk of the content we see and hear. To do so can require courage, depending on where a person works and in what community he or she lives. Sometimes it requires annoying or even defying friends or family.
I keep hearing talk about a “silent majority” once again, another echo of a Sixties I well remember and certainly didn’t want to see come round again in this bizarro form. There really was a silent majority back then, but that was before a half century of an intense leftist march that has come to affect and now dominate nearly every aspect or our culture. Does this majority still exist? Will it speak, and when, and how?
Today is the 11th anniversary of commenter FredHJr’s death
[NOTE: The following is a somewhat revised version of a post that has appeared previously on this blog.]
Unbelievable that it’s been eleven years since commenter FredHJr died suddenly and tragically. As time passes, the number of readers here who don’t remember Fred must necessarily increase, so for those of you who don’t know who FredHJr was, please see this and this, as well as these.
Fred’s death was extremely tragic for his family. But it was tragic for this blog, too, because he was an invaluable and irreplaceable member of our community, a “changer” who knew a lot about the Left, and a keen observer of politics, history, religion, culture—of life itself. I still think about him often, wondering what he’d have to say about everything that’s happened in these last eleven years.
Every year on the anniversary, I offer some excerpts from his many comments here.
This comment is from October 18, 2008, just a few weeks before Obama was elected president for the first time:
It’s the Marxist/Leninist ethics of expediency. No regrets. Whatever it takes to discredit anything the other side does and excuse the sins of your own side.
…this reveals a lot about who is about to take power and how they will wield it against the rest of us. They get away with it and many will not at all be troubled by it because they are shaped by the post-modernism, cultural Marxism that they imbibed during their formative and educational experience. If we as a people cannot name this accurately and expunge its corrosive influence over our lives, then down into the wages of perdition and disaster we go.
The comment is from October 28, 2008. The election was getting close:
Obama is part of a nexus of interests. What the American dopes who will put him in office are getting is a NETWORK of alliances and interests, running the gamut from Finance (Soros) to academia to media to law. Thus far, in order to appeal to the Middle Muddle he has been packaged as a moderate or centrist. But once in office the venomous swarm of this network will burst out of the nest and devour the host. You wait and see. And I’m not eager for the moment to say “I told you so.” I really would it be the case that it never happens at all.
This was a comment of Fred’s from the very beginning of the Obama presidency, but I think it’s worth mulling over today:
For me, Western Civilization is an incredibly complex work that has eclectically and also seamlessly borrowed the excellence and the virtues of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and the Enlightenment. The High Middle Ages and the Renaissance also made important contributions. In its totality it is a meritocracy and a liberation of humanity that has resulted in ever greater learning and material prosperity and health for most of the people who live under it. It is not an unblemished history. Yet in its totality it gleams with advancement when juxtaposed against civilizations which enslave humanity.
I think the beginning of the end of our civilization began with the French Revolution and The Terror. It was the beginning of the elaboration of totalitarian thought and throughout the 19th century this kept on finding newer permutations of elegant, intellectual terror. The 20th century was the culmination of the barbarity of totalitarianism.
These are chosen somewhat randomly, but so very much of what I looked at that Fred had written was on target.
RIP Fred, and may your family be comforted in their grief. We miss you.
There have been other commenters here who may have died, and I would like to mention them too, but for no one else did I actually get official word of that person’s death. One commenter who comes to mind is “strcpy,” who announced that he was very ill and then disappeared shortly thereafter, about ten years ago. I wrote him an email but never heard back, and I fear he’s gone. But I don’t know for sure. Another prolific commenter who disappeared many years ago was Occam’s Beard. I was never able to contact him after that, and so I fear something tragic may have happened.
There may be others, as well. I wouldn’t necessarily find out. Sometimes people just stop commenting because they get busy or they get tired or they get turned off. But it stands to reason some of them will have died. So I’ll take this opportunity to say RIP for all of them.
To despair or not to despair?
That is the question – or at least, one of the questions.
I know that some of you – maybe most of you – are feeling some despair right now. Maybe a lot of despair. What we’ve been seeing – and what I’ve been writing – in the last couple of months and especially the last few weeks has been discouraging, and that’s really a very mild word for it.
I can only write honestly about what I see. I can’t be a false cheerleader. But that doesn’t mean I’m a seer. I can’t know the future, and I’ve been surprised before. I hope I’ll be surprised again, this time pleasantly.
Some people are expressing hope. One is Victor David Hanson:
The Reign of Terror will end and the Thermidor reaction is on the horizon. Today’s opportunist virtue-signaler will be tomorrow’s gullible fool. Tonight’s brave looter and edgy arsonist will be tomorrow’s matter-of-fact felon. This morning’s memo-writing social justice executive and administrator will be seen as tomorrow’s rank abettor of McCarthyite persecutions. And the coveted and esteemed racial arsonist of the moment soon will become the ostracized segregationist.
Americans believe there is one thing more regrettable than a falsifier—and that is an opportunistic and careerist falsifier.
But I’m not sure what Americans believe anymore – that is, the majority. I’m not sure it even matters, because the mob speaks loudly, the Deep State has its own agenda, and too many governors and mayors seem to have lost their minds as much of the nation watches, nearly hypnotized.
I think it will come down to core beliefs in mankind, in destiny, perhaps even in guidance from above. I don’t know which way the turning will go. I do know that this is a time of crisis.
Once again, let’s hear from Yeats, in a poem written almost exactly 100 years ago, during a time of bleakness and crisis right at the end of the First World War. It’s not a hopeful poem, to say the least. But notice that it ends with a question rather than an answer:
THE SECOND COMING
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?
Long ago, in another time of despair (the late 1960s), I read a book of Eastern philosophy that mentioned that those Hindu statues of goddesses and gods, the ones with all the arms, always depicted one hand placed palm forward in an attitude that is meant to symbolize “Fear not; all is well despite whatever you may temporarily see that tells you otherwise.”
I’m trying to remind myself of that.