Poets and Politicians

Poetic truth in the aftermath of an assassination attempt

“The falcon cannot hear the falconer” —W. B. Yeats

Like all of you, I’ve been listening, reading, and watching most everything I can about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Maybe my level of attention is of a different kind, though. It’s those journalism genes kicking in. A hard thing to rein in when you’ve been at the game as long as I have. I’ve also been checking a lot of social media—watching, reading, and, frankly, being disgusted by a great deal of it—the fools who post that Biden “sent the orders” on Trump, that somehow the vitriol in our politics has been “one-sided,” claiming that only the Left has been using incendiary language, the kind that fuels violence. People, really? Truth is, we are all at fault for that language. It’s everywhere, all the time. And especially on social media.

Still, some posts, although few, have been remarkably thoughtful, thought-provoking, even important.

This one in particular from someone on Instagram is a quote attributed to the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas . . .

“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.”

And to back that up—about politicians and poets—the words of David French in an opinion piece in The New York Times . . .

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

William Butler Yeats wrote these words in his poem “The Second Coming” in a different time of violence and fear. The year was 1919, Europe was still reeling from World War I, a deadly influenza pandemic was sweeping through the world, and the Irish war of independence was underway. Yeats was writing from the heart of a storm, a storm that would grow indescribably worse in 20 short years.

French went on to write that by “center” Yeats was referring not to some political middle ground, but to civilization’s moral center. French said he thought of those words when he saw the blood on Trump’s ear. Now, is the time, he went on to write, to rise up and declare, in one voice, “Enough.”

“We either recover our sense of decency and basic respect for the humanity of our opponents, or we will see, in Yeats’s words, the ‘blood-dimmed tide loosed’ on our land.”

This is not the time for more politics. Not the time to rev-up the marketing machine that turns Trump into some superhero martyr, as I’ve seen posted over and over on Instagram. It is not the time for ridiculous conspiracy theories, including the one that the entire incident was “staged.” And it is not the time for those at the Republican National Convention, as David Smith, the Washington Bureau Chief for The Guardian wrote, “to sow division and rub salt in the wounds” of our nation.

The words of another great poet, W. H. Auden . . .

“Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational moral choice.”

That moral choice is now. We have got to get this moment right. It could make or break our country’s history, set our cultural and societal tones for decades to come. We simply cannot, as Yeats warned in “The Second Coming,” stand by and watch as “the darkness drops again.”

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David W. Berner is the author of several award-winning books of fiction and memoir, and has been a journalist for more than forty-five years.

Photo by David Gough