Yeats and the USA of 2015

I was watching a show on TV the other day, when a character -- this was a reality show, mind you, so it was theoretically unrehearsed -- quoted a few lines of a poem that sounded more 1900 than 2015:

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.

The poem, as any English major would hopefully know (should I quiz my brother?), was from the pen of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats after the end of World War I.  I'm sure that most English majors would have an idea of the points that Yeats was making, and that most philosophy majors would think they knew what he was writing about, and likely be wrong.

Yeats has been dead almost 80 years now, so he's not around to tell us, and in fact it really doesn't matter.  He wasn't talking of ISIS when he wrote of the "blood-dimmed tide"; he wasn't referring to murders of police officers when he gave us "the ceremony of innocence is drowned."

He was not referring to the frustration and sense of resignation of the underemployed, or the waste of the wisdom of older workers when he gave us "the best lack all conviction."

You wonder, though, if he were foretelling the rise of Barack Obama in "the worst are full of passionate intensity."  Yeats himself, at least at that time, though an Irish nationalist and a Protestant, was certainly one who shied away from excessive confrontation and the revolutionary fringes.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity ..."

Maybe it really doesn't matter of what Yeats was specifically writing.  Perhaps it is a far, far better thing we take away from his poetry by seeing that line as a warning.  Let us not confuse passion with being actually right, any more than we confuse the lack of passion with being unmotivated inwardly.

Let us look, for example, at radical Islamists.  May we not, as the Obamists do, regard their passion as worthy of accommodation or compromise but, rather, as a mask deceiving us into believing that there is a shred of correctness in their murderous interpretation of what they call  "faith."

Let us look at people marching down the street calling for the murder of policemen and not let their energy, their chants, their enthusiasm be seen as anything other than a smokescreen covering up their attempt to get the populace to sanctify their murders.

Let us look at the leadership in the White House pulling the strings of puppet fringe movements like "Black Lives Matter"; cutting deals with the nation's enemies in Iran; pulling our punches with Islamic murderers in ISIS; throwing open the borders of our own country with a passionate display of welcome despite no assets to accommodate them.

Let us learn to question when we see "passionate intensity" and replace our admiration for it with a search for wisdom.  For "mere anarchy" is indeed being "loosed upon the world", to be replaced eventually by the most passionate.

And right now, those with the "passionate intensity" are murdering the innocent.


And others are sitting in the White House, ignoring it and letting it happen.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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