The Hour of the Beast

[dweller]

by Joel Kovel

In this sour, apprehensive, and Bush-inflicted month of November, we should remember the great surge of activism
set going by the vain attempt to stop the Republican juggernaut. If we are to honor its promise, though, we need to
learn its lesson, and understand more deeply the nature of the enemy. For we have been here before.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .” The poet Yeats saw it coming, remarkably, as long ago as 1919.
Since for Yeats history was cyclic, he saw it as coming again and again, building and rebuilding itself from the
disintegration of society. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” He foresaw
the perversion of the Christian eschatology by the monstrosity of war: not Christ, but a beast would return, even a
beast claiming direction by Jesus. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem
to be born?” Our apocalyptic Right--half Christian fundamentalism, half capitalist rapacity—is the beast for the
moment. It is the abomination against which it warns, for the beast is nothing more than the human form become
monstrous and ecologically nihilistic.

In the midst of these gloomy forebodings, one feature of the recent election especially sticks in the throat: even
allowing for voter fraud, the propaganda machine, and the like, the fact remains that millions of what for want of a
better word we must call “ordinary people” gave consent to, indeed, believed in, a man who is beyond doubt the
worst president in American history, and certainly the one most harmful to their material interests, not to mention,
those of humanity as a whole. It is as though Yeats’ beast has been reborn in the American soul, confounding, once
again, the threadbare hope that workers will sensibly vote their class interests.

What can be wrong with so many? As London’s Daily Mirror blared after the election—picking up on a quip of H.L.
Mencken, who once opined that nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people:
How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB? But the affection for W. is not a question of being “dumb” in the sense of
feeble-mindedness. It is rather a kind of bemusement, of being led astray by an inner force. It is an affair of the
heart—that heart of which Pascal said that it had reasons of which Reason knows not. The Left has always been
uncomfortable looking inward, and has paid dearly for being so. Again and again it crash lands with its economism,
its rendering of “interests” in crudely materialistic terms, and its forgetting what “meaning” means in human
existence.

In 1790 , William Blake, roaming the streets of London, did “mark in every face I meet/Marks of weakness, marks of
woe.
In every cry of every Man In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear”

more here

dp

[WildClarySage]

1. In other words, the more things change

the more they stay the same.

[Pharaoh]

2. Yes dweller

We certainly are going to be ridin the beast down the steep black hole.....:hurts:

[dweller]

3. did anyone actually read

this whole article, and contemplate the ramifications that the author presented?


i am curious, for i thought, though perhaps mistakenly, that this would have lent some insight into what we are facing today in just how we have come to where we are now in *moron's America.


sigh :kick:

dp