The first days of the new Trump administration have been dizzying. As he now rules with almost nothing constraining him, Donald Trump could wreak more havoc in the U.S. and the world than even the most pessimistic forecasts could have foreseen. His administration is now a seasoned and well prepared battering ram that could bring humanity’s long and exhausting climb out of a muck driven by primordial survival instincts to an abrupt and decisive end.
Can it be more clear than this: Trump is carrying water for the world’s most vicious oligarchs, those here with their front row seats at the inauguration, and those who from Kremlin seats are mauling Ukraine.
We were poised so relatively near Dr. King’s envisioned mountaintop, we can now perhaps recognize. But maybe there’s some flaw in our less-than-perfect makeup as a species that simply will not permit us to ever finally get to it. Some people point to quantum theory notions of parallel universes, some like me see such multiverses in byproducts of a reality that confronts us in every microsecond with choice confronting a menu of possibilities.
We’ve had the luxury in recent decades to sit back and contemplate how awful it must have been to live through two world wars, the Holocaust and the human sacrifices of the last 110 years and what sacrifices were required to restore a sense of progress overall. But we’d fallen into a complacency that brought us short of the vigilance required to ensure that none of our past horrors would repeat.
So now we are again in the thick of it. Now it is 1931 Germany, or so, except that there is no telling how much evil we are, indeed, capable of from here on. If there’s anything truly shocking from the last few days, it is seeing how flatly and completely our leaders have condescended to this new reality.
On the day of Trump’s inauguration this week, a friend posted a famous poem by W.H. Auden that testified to “ironic points of light.” It was designed to offer hope in the form of small acts of kindness or resistance that can carry us through in the midst of darkness and apathy.
That poem is titled, “September 9. 1939,” and Auden wrote it in response to news that very day of the onset of the inevitably dreaded second world war that began when Hitler invaded Poland.
Auden opened the poem as one who was sitting in a New York City dive bar when first hearing news of the invasion: “I sit in one of the dives on Fifty-second Street, uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear circulate over the bright and darkened lands of the earth, obsessing our private lives; the unmentionable odour of death offends the September night.”
He went on to then conclude, “All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: there is no such thing as the state and no one exists alone; hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
“Defenceless under the night, our world in stupor lies; yet, dotted everywhere, ironic points of light, flash out wherever the just exchange their messages: May I, composed like them, of Eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair, show an affirming flame.”
How little did Auden know, or could have even imagined, what proceeded to happen, the thousands upon millions of lives lost. Auden later became highly critical of this poem of his, doubting its optimistic tone that issued from that day, unaware as he was of the multitude of horrors that were to come.
Still, his poem today gives us a glimpse of what life was like in that respite between the two world wars that some came to call “the long weekend,” or just a pause in a 1914-1945 conflict that eventually cost over two hundred million lives in total from among the world’s most ostensibly civilized nations.
