The title of this blog post is a reference to the poem “The Cure at Troy” by Seamus Heaney. Its most famous fragment was quoted by Bill Clinton in 1995 at Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland during the ongoing peace process (the Good Friday Agreement came in 1998):
“History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.”
But it was another poem that recently caught my eye and had me connecting Trump to Nixon — and to many other demagogues of various stars, bars, and stripes — like a metastasizing cancer infiltrating nodal stations across all time and space. “August 1968” was written by W.H. Auden and is a distilled reflection on power and oppression that, in present day, would well tolerate the alternate title: “The Idiot Trump”… and here’s hoping we dump that irredeemable sack of maggot-infested goat shit, that bloviating brain-pox of imbecilic bull-shittery, that feculent scourge of bilious and toxic nonsense — once and for all — on Nov 5, 2024!
August 1968:
“The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.”
The Kool-Aid crowd on the Christian Right have come to see the lying, cheating, thieving, racist libertine and quasi-fascist that is Trump as some sort of anointed deliverer from God above (who not only works in mysterious ways but also has a really fucked-up sense of humor!). And this all makes perfect sense. Birds of a feather, as they say, flock together. Frauds seek out and recognize other frauds in order to perpetuate even greater fraud (and further pack an already fraudulent Supreme Court). Different game, same graft. This seeming dark/light paradox is actually a balanced equation, a marriage of convenience, designed to maximize leverage and profits. In my moments of agitated pessimism, it is a third poem — one by William Butler Yeats called “The Second Coming” — that puts Trump’s rise in a slightly different biblical light…
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 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: 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?“
Great Exudations 