The Gyre Cannot Hold

The Second Coming of Political Violence

This week’s left me thinking about a poem by William Yeats. Written in the wake of the Great War, it’s called 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?

A bullet ripping through a nation. Blood spurting from its wound. A scrap in the mud for a knife. A declaration of war. A fatherless family. Nightmares.

I often feel jaded and cynical about America - that we’ve failed to heal a 400 year old wound, that we live in a technocracy, where politicians bend the knee to monied interests or their own political self-preservation rather than the voice of the people they allege to represent. That our cities are more unaffordable than ever. That our climate is in a dire state, irresponsibly harvested by those who will not live to see its consequences, growing annually more dire. That the notion of home ownership will be lost with a generation like the blu-ray, transfers of generational wealth notwithstanding. That we’re becoming more hateful. Less curious. Forgetting ourselves.

But if I arrest myself - pull myself out and sit upon the wood block, I do still believe in America. In her dignity, in her excellence. Her ideals and her promises. In her flaws, her stumbles, her humanity.

I believe in the dignity of the Office of the Presidency. In civil disagreement. In bipartisanship. In multilateralism and in international cooperation. I believe in freedom of choice and equality of opportunity and reject the notion that those are fundamentally in tension. I believe in Palestinian suffering and Israeli suffering and black suffering and Sudanese suffering and Jewish suffering and Uyghur suffering and Latino suffering and young, white, online, self-hating male suffering; a non-exhaustive list in no particular order. I believe in non-binary gender identification and the right to privacy within the bedroom and outside of it. I believe in bodily autonomy, even if that means wearing gauges.

I believe I am reasonable. And naive. Romantic. Selfish. Lazy and curious.

Foibled.

The unfortunate reality is that it is highly likely that we are going to see a continued escalation of political violence in this country. I have more thoughts on this, but I must quite literally hop in the car to go interview strangers at the Venice Beach Gold’s. More next week.