RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: The Third Thing: insanity defended with devout solemnity  Fri Oct 03, 2014 8:37 pm | |
| Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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?
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
The first thing to do is laugh, of course.
We stare tragedy right in the face, so close to it we can smell its stale breath, and it is reaching for us.
Everything we say should not, must not, cannot happen — every bit of it does happen. Teenage gang-bangers with AR-15s car-jack Sally Suburbanite and toss her baby out the window. Middle-aged speed freaks imprison their own mothers and force them to write bad checks. One-hundred-thirty-five years after emancipation, people are owned as slaves and the value of their labor is stolen from them. The falcon cannot hear the falconer and Vicky Weaver and 81 Branch Davidians lay slain.
Should not. Must not. Cannot. Does.
And there’s plenty more, of course, and every bit of it is tragic. Except us, for we are tragic and ridiculous. We wag our fingers and deliver pithy little lectures on morality. Or we wag our fingers and deliver pithy little lectures on utility. And we argue amongst ourselves and hone and polish and perfect our pithy little arguments until they are fit to be inscribed on parchment. And we wag our fingers and deliver them from whatever soap-box we can find.
And until lately no one was listening. And even though we have contrived a nearly perfect roadmap to civilization, it is being incinerated in a conflagration of savagery.
So laugh, damnit. Laughter is what’s left when every other precious thing is gone…
Our tragedy arises not from the precious things that have been taken from us, but from the precious things we have spurned. They have not beaten us yet, but they are winning. And they are winning not because of their strength, but because of our refusal to do battle from our strength. We have crippled ourselves, and in doing it we have given them an advantage they could never have gained on their own.
Without remorse — as a matter of pride even — we have conceded their most basic premise, and they are using our own power to destroy us. To destroy civilization, really, to raze in twenty years what is still unraised after twenty centuries. The worst specimens of humanity are full of passionate intensity, and they stand unopposed.
And who could oppose them, taking account that we are one among them? Indeed, I have seen the enemy and I’ll be damned if it isn’t us!
And I have a lot of nerve, haven’t I? You were gracious enough to invite me into your mind, and I repay your hospitality by blaming you for everything on Earth that’s wrong. There ought to be a law…
Oops!
Which team are we on again…?
Which team do we think we’re on?
Why, we’re the people who fight naked savagery, of course. Right…? Yes, yes, of course. We fight that naked savagery tooth and claw, hammer and tong, sixes and sevens and nines. By god, we hate that naked savagery. Don’t we…?
Yup.
We hate it so much we clothe it in bright-striped tails and call it Uncle Sam. We stick a feather in its cap and call it blood pudding. Or something. But we can’t bear that naked savagery, and we won’t let it bare its head around us.
And when we go up against an AR-15 with a pen knife, it’s just not right that our tail lights vanish in the distance.
Just not right!
Read the rest here: http://splendorquest.com/31/meet-the-third-thing/ |
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