Sunday Reflection: "Full Of 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."

-- the first stanza of "The Second Coming," by Nobel Prize winning Irish poet and dramatist W.B. Yeats (6/13/1865 - 1/28/1939), written in 1919 just after the end of World War I and as Ireland's war of independence from Britain was beginning. It reflected a sense that the world was spinning out of control and into a totalitarian world led by "the worst... full of passionate intensity." The second stanza of the poem describes a "second coming" of that dark world, asking in that famous line, "what rough beast, it's hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" Twenty years later, World War II in Europe began with Hitler's invasion of Poland. 

In these times, we're facing a resurgence of far-right, fascistic movements around the world, not the least of which is represented here by the Malignant Loser and his MAGA cult following, the worst, "full of passionate intensity" as fascism's adoring followers were 85 years ago. They were defeated then, and they must be now.