The Irish Poet Who Predicted the Future

My friends:

In 1920, one hundred and six years ago, the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats published this timeless and certainly prescient poem. Although Yeats did eventually return to Ireland to found the Abbey Theater, he, together with James Joyce, G.B. Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, and Frank McCourt (among many others), left Ireland for good and spent most of their lives in London, in European travels, and in the United States. Joyce chose "silence, exile, and cunning," and Beckett was known to say that he "preferred France at war to Ireland at peace."

The Catholic Church, censorship, poverty, a mean narrow mindedness, the most extraordinary misogyny may be some of the reasons for the departure of these Greats. Today, best-selling novelist Sally Rooney will not allow her work to be translated into Hebrew--and she still lives in Ireland. Douglas Murray just reminded us that during WW II, Ireland would not allow Churchill to have access to Irish ports. Their overwhelming hatred of the UK plus their preference for Hitler might explain this--as does their over-the-top contemporary scapegoating of the Jews for the UK's refusal to get out of Ireland. One of the most Marxist of feminist anti-Zionists whom I once corresponded with lives in Ireland. (However, a good colleague who co-wrote a very important book about 9/11 lives there too...I admit: It's hard to draw an accurate picture without my going there and doing thousands of interviews on the ground.)

Nevertheless, please read W.B. Yeats's poem. It tells us where we are right now, where France and all Europe are right now, and where America is headed if we do not--do what?

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

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 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?