As President Bush took a question Thursday in the White House Rose Garden about scandals involving his Attorney General, he remarked, "I've got confidence in Al Gonzales doin' the job." Simultaneously, a sparrow flew overhead and left a splash on the President's sleeve, which Bush tried several times to wipe off.The White House is trying to spin it as good luck (I kid you not) but just think, on the day where Bush gets maybe (hopefully) the final Democratic capitulation of his Administration, his Pyrrhic victory in getting all the money he wanted to keep his fuck-up alive and kill @ 90 American soldiers/month, with his poll numbers in the deepest toilet of his career, even nature turns against him.
All this week I've been thinking about the astonishing prescience of David Chase and the Sopranos writing staff in embedding one particular poem by William Butler Yeats in the A.J. storyline for Tony and Carmela to also hear:
THE SECOND COMINGTurning 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 convictions, 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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
The best lack all convictions, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity. Goddamn, I hope that's not how it all ends. I'm for the best getting their intensity back. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it, in that dark, dark hour. Al Gore was righteous and engaging on The Daily Show tonight, he's got it.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. Will Cheney get his way -- and widen his apocalypse?
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Satan, embodiment of the apocalypse, comes to Israel -- per the above link, the flashpoint for the battle with Iran, which turns into the Third World War, including sudden attacks on American soil. Bethlehem, while being is Israel, in this context represents that sociopathic George W. Bush Christian exceptionalism that has already provided kindling for the larger disaster.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer...
Hear him?
He just took a dump on him.
Crossposted to The Daily Reel.
5 comments:
Too bad it wasn't a condor.
-m
m, are you married? You're hilarious!
Ah Netter, this is why I read you every day. This post is a brilliant connecting of all the elemental dots: politics, nature, history and...Sopranos. Just yummy.
And yes, M's condor comment... hoot!
Ah, nice to see there's still an audience for poetry!
Ah, Swainsy my little buttercup, where were you when I needed you?
(ps: you're 11 months too late; I was married last summer & remarkably marriage hasn't ruined my sense of humor. yet.)
Erika -- You don't know me but we almost met when you were in NYC this winter. Mark was talking you up bigtime & i had planned to see your book reading but ultimately couldn't make it. I think your writing is a scream.
As for you, Mo: as always, nice post -- you da man! (I think the repubs will ultimately be *very* sorry about yesterday's vote -- like in ~ 18 months. As for GWB, the vote was his speed-pass into the low teens, approval-wise.)
xoxoxoxox
-m
Post a Comment