February 17, 2025

6 thoughts on “The Centre Will Not Hold

  1. Brilliant and unfortunately so true. There must be enough of us to change this. Thank you for your comments.
    I love Atwood and have read most everything that she has published. I do not agree with her on abortion though I do understand her point of view. She is entitled to her opinion and we must respect each other or we will all go down in flames together.

  2. It is interesting in these chaotic and warped and twisted times of Joe Biden, where men are now women and nothing at all makes sense, anymore, and words have lost their meaning, to see Yeats’ “The Second Coming” coming back around in here a little over a hundred years since “The Second Coming” was written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer.

    For those unfamiliar with Yeats and “The Second Coming,” Wikipedia tells us that the poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe, that being post-WWI, a major conflagration where there were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded with the total number of deaths including 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians.

    Keeping in mind that Yeats was Irish, the poem was written at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, and before the British government had decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland.

    The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic which killed at least 50 million worldwide.

    So what is “The Second Coming” about?

    It basically predicts that time is up for humanity, and that civilization as we know it is about to be undone.

    But what, pray tell, and especially in these weird and twisted times we find ourselves in today, is “civilization as we know it?”

    In these times of Joe Biden, especially in criminal sanctuary cities like Democrat-controlled San Francisco, and Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, can civilization be said to even exist, anymore?

    Which thought takes me to John Locke and Chapter II of “The Second Treatise of Government,” titled “Of The State of War” where Locke wrote as follows, to wit:

    For by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred;

    And one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion;

    Because such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule but that of force and violence, and so, may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power.

  3. In my opinion, it isn’t George Orwell who had the correct model, it is Aldous Huxley. Orwell may have what it feels like in the end but how you get there is plainly in Huxley’s wheelhouse. Hopefully, this comic picture posts well.

  4. As someone who has read both Huxley and Orwell, and “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, I think both “A Brave New World” and “1984” can be incorporated into “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, and the combination would describe to a tee where we are in this country today with Joe Biden at the helm and his State Science Institute which informs us that based on science, men are really women, and when it is freezing and you are scraping ice off your windshield, it is really global warming.

    And not all of us are brainwashed, either.

    As to Huxley, he was born July 26, 1894, Godalming, Surrey, England and he died November 22, 1963 in Los Angeles, California, U.S., so he was witness to the insanity of WWI, and the ravages of the 1918 flu, as well, as did Yeats.

    As to “Brave New World” (1932), according to Britannica, it marked a turning point in Huxley’s career being like his earlier work a fundamentally satiric novel, but it also vividly expresses Huxley’s distrust of 20th-century trends in both politics and technology, with the novel presenting a nightmarish vision of a future society in which psychological conditioning forms the basis for a scientifically determined and immutable caste system that, in turn, obliterates the individual and grants all control to the World State.

    As to Orwell, he was born June 25, 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India and died January 21, 1950.

    Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921, and the fates would have it, Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, so there is a definite connection between the two!

    And Ayn Rand, original name Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, was born February 2, 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia and died March 6, 1982 in New York, New York,

    As a student at Leningrad State University, she studied history and became acquainted with the works of Plato and Aristotle.

    So we are looking at people whose views of life, including Yeats were formed based on events in other countries long ago, and it makes one have to wonder if they all were not possessed of prescient vision that they could see our times so clearly back then and describe them so accurately as we are finding them today!

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