Passionate Intensity

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?

Yeats and the headline (the current, stupid, 24/7 media sound) speak
of the same thing. It's about the best among us lacking conviction,
while the worst among us, the ditto-heads in the new wars of religion
and hatred are full of passionate intensity.

This discussion of health care is already the most passionately
intense discourse this country has had since Vietnam. Like Vietnam it
has the immediacy and urgency of who will live, and who will be maimed
and die to serve the corporations' agendas, the corporations' profits,
who will serve that "shape with lion body and the head of a man,

"A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,"

This discussion is no longer a coherent, democratic discourse. It
involves the birthers who are the same people who are shouting down
sane discussion of health care.

This passionate intensity is a thing of thuggery, of militant, radical
stupidity. It is being prompted and exploited by the pill pimps and
medical insurance gangsters. They are trying to perpetuate
government-sanctioned, obscene, predatory profit on sick people and
nothing else.

Extreme national polarization is again upon us. The coming national,
economic, cultural turmoil will make the Time of Vietnam pale in
comparison.

We do not live in a world where dark, nefarious conspiracy gives the
masters-of-this-world greater control, greater power. We live in a
world where things fall apart, the centre does not hold.