Not with a bang but a whimper
The election is over. I wasn’t going to be happy if either Bush or Kerry won, but I’m finding I’m not really upset today either. I’m mostly left with an apathetic tiredness and a cold, empty feeling. The masses are asses. My fellow Americans just don’t care and we will all get what we deserve.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
~~~
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. The Hollow Men -T.S. Eliot
November 3rd, 2004 at 11:39 pm
I am also not white-hot angry, as many of us on the left are, but just sad. There was no doubt in my mind that Bush would be re-elected by Joe Six-Pack, the good church-goin’ fella.
I like your poetic reaction. Here is the poem that came to my mind:
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?
– “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats