"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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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?"
William Butler Yeats
"The Second Coming," written in 1919
I am reminded of Yeats' apocalyptic poem — written 90 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of World War I — after reading an intriguing column by David Brooks in the New York Times.
Brooks, who calls himself a "moderate-conservative," writes that, while there are things that moderates like about the Obama administration's direction, there are aspects that give moderates pause.
"Uh Oh — He Lost David Brooks," says the headline on Jennifer Rubin's entry at Contentions, Commentary magazine's blog. Does it necessarily follow, logically, that, because Brooks has the audacity to ask questions, Obama "lost" his support?
Rubin writes that this defection, if you want to call it that, is "not quite LBJ losing Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam War," but it may be bad enough. Indeed, it may be, if Obama and his true-blue supporters are not open-minded enough to recognize this for what it is.
Some on the left say the stimulus package was too small and that the administration was too concerned with bipartisanship. Some on the right say it was too much.
Those on the left, who now hold the balance of power in this country, accuse those who disagree with them of being racists because the president is black (well, actually, biracial). This is a case of playing the race card. It is similar, in many ways, to the tactic used by those on the right, when they held power a few years ago and accused those who disagreed with them of not being patriotic enough. That was the patriot card.
Neither card is justified except in extreme circumstances. They are used, it seems to me, to obscure uncomfortable problems and thoughtful questions. The fact that someone finds fault in some of Obama's proposals does not make that person racist, just as the fact that someone expressed concerns about the wisdom of invading Iraq did not make that person unpatriotic.
I do not mean to suggest that some of Obama's critics are not racists, nor do I mean that some of those who opposed the invasion of Iraq were not unpatriotic. But they are/were the exceptions to the rule. And those negative labels are/were applied by a mob mentality instead of trying to answer serious questions that had been raised.
The outrage that has been expressed recently about a cartoon in the New York Post and a book display at a Barnes & Noble in Florida is merely the tip of the iceberg, like the outrage that was aimed at French fries during the hysteria of the patriot card a few years ago. They are mere symbols, and, as George Carlin once said, I prefer to leave symbols to the symbol-minded.
Just as it was when the patriot card was being played, those of us in the center feel that important issues are being swept under the rug.
Not everyone looks at things through the alarming prisms of unemployment and foreclosure. The majority of Americans continue to live lives of apparent security. They go to work each day for the same employer whose paychecks have kept food on their tables for many years. They sleep under the same roofs that have kept them safe and dry for those same years.
They may not realize it, but they are the fortunate ones. Nevertheless, their security can be gone in the wink of an eye, like the hundreds of thousands of people who perished in the tsunami the day after Christmas in 2004.
I consider myself a centrist. And I have wondered about many of the things that Brooks writes about in his column. It isn't that I disagree with many of the proposals. But I vacillate between wondering if we aren't trying to do too much too soon (and spending too much to do it) and wondering if we're doing enough to address the urgent problems posed by the recession.
If one does not speak constantly in glowing terms about Obama, does that make that person a racist? No. Does that make me a racist? Hardly. Does that mean Obama has "lost" me? Hardly. It means I have questions that, to this point, have not been answered.
In fact, the liberal frenzy over Obama often reminds me of the conservative frenzy of the 1980s, when having a hero to love (Reagan) required the existence of an enemy to hate.
When people can no longer feel free to ask questions in America, this is no longer the America in which I was brought up. It is an alien land.
I heard on the radio yesterday that saving is up. That would have been good news a few years ago, but today it means that people are saving their money instead of spending it, which will not help revive the economy. Consumer spending is the fuel of the economy.
If consumers are not spending, employers have no reason to hire more workers. Indeed, they have even more reason to let workers go. It is not racist for the unemployed to wonder how they can find work as long as economic conditions are killing off jobs, not creating them. If you need more evidence of this, just wait until this Friday, when the latest jobless report comes out. It is a vicious downward spiral that will not stop until those who are still employed put aside their fears and put some of their money into circulation. What is the government doing to encourage this?
I'd like to see the folks on the left working with the folks on the right to solve the problems that threaten not just this country but the rest of the world. Everything is interconnected. But we can't fix everything at once, and, as Yeats warned, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
And the center surely will not hold as long as the left and the right insist on pointing fingers at each other.
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