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Terrible Ugliness Is Born

 



Yeats was sometimes wrong. As maybe were The Old Masters. Not sure about them today.

But Yeats, yes - sometimes a terrible ugliness is born.

The last few months have seen ambassadorial resignations, assassination, slaughter of innocents, wars, aerial bombardments, mass arrests - while the West slips closer to authoritarianism, and the idea of democracy withers.

Meanwhile, global heating is inexorably killing life as we know it, on our planet.

This we know, yet we go to ballgames, TV awards, movies, clubs, restaurants, bars, and play away our cares, because, as Eliot another poet said, approximately, that too much reality is unbearable.

If this blog has not commented on every event, poems have been written, tears shed, hands wrung, and despair felt, rest assured.

Now Trump, our strange bedfellow, is here in the UK. The Age of Social Media is giving way to the Age of AI. Vast fortunes are about to be made, and millions made jobless. War and medicine, art and science, sex and religion, will change forever. As with the Atomic Age or the Age of Steam, good and evil will jostle for the upper hand, the rich get richer, and the world continue slouching towards Mayhem to be born, as Yeats' greatest poem almost goes.




Comments

Jack said…
I'm into bi-lingual (French/English) puns these days, and I like the idea that Trump is loud and annoying, like the sound of a trumpet. And he's also tricky and an illusion, like "Trompe-l'œil"
Sat Sept 20, 04:15:00 pm 2025
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