Wednesday, October 01, 2008

William Butler Yeats, Crisis Economics Poet

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?
Just swap "Washington" for "Bethlehem."

Bring on the Swedish Plan. Among other things, it worked pretty well for Sweden's crisis. Of course, it's Swedish and therefore suspect on the right--anything borne in on the shoulders of tall blond(e) Scandinavian socialists must be riddled with libertine values... like insisting on value for tax payer funds.

Or something that's vaguely responsible, please.

What it sounds like Congress is doing is pouring more oil into the engine that's belching white smoke as the old Buick careens down the road. More than oil's necessary. Oh, oil is too--but only as a stop gap, so that there's enough lubrication to get the heap into the mechanic's without having the engine seize up.


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