Jesse always seems to capture the mood of the day with his ability to hark back to the previous Fourth Turning. Darkness is descending upon the world and it will require courage, bravery, and fortitude to defeat the powers of evil. Are you ready? Will you be counted? Or will you bow down before the dark masters?
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, and I doubt we shall see them lit again in our lifetime.”
Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, Whitehall, 3 August 1914
September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden, NYC, Oct 1939I 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.Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge image made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return…From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?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.
Muck About says:
Fine verse for our doomer TBP!
I for one, will not bow, nor be trod under. If nothing else, as an old man, I can put up a damn fine rear action defense while the younger among us group for battle.
Might not last long, but, hell, I’ve been here long enough already.
SSS: I’ve often wondered about your nom de plume. Does it happen to stand for “sexy senior sitizen”???
MA
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
13 
0
1st October 2012 at 9:23 am
Administrator says:
It stands for Senile Senior Spy
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
13 
0
1st October 2012 at 9:26 am
Anonymous says:
The Five-Book Prelude, by William Wordsworth
[5] Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: (from Ode. Intimations of Immortality)
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
6 
0
1st October 2012 at 9:37 am
flash says:
Anon = I
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
1st October 2012 at 9:37 am
Stucky says:
SSS = Sucking Salma’s titS
Like or Dislike:
2 
2
1st October 2012 at 10:25 am
ThePessimisticChemist says:
Lucky bastard.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
6 
0
1st October 2012 at 10:28 am
Screech says:
And another for you, Admin:
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
A..E. Housman, Last Poems
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
1st October 2012 at 10:47 am
Celtic Tiger says:
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
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.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
1st October 2012 at 12:23 pm
harry p. says:
great Bill Hicks pic/comment +100
…”and we kill those people.”
I still remember the first time I heard that…
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
1st October 2012 at 12:25 pm
SSS says:
Mucky, Admin, and Stucky
Please select only one from the following menu:
1) Bite me.
2) Eat my shorts.
3) Stuff it.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
5 
0
1st October 2012 at 3:27 pm
Dave Doe says:
SSS,
What happened to 4) All of the Above
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
1st October 2012 at 10:13 pm
Mr. Fishgrunter says:
I’m not too worried: if recent history is any guide, the US will be two, closer to three, years late for the destruction derby, and a whole swarm of Russians will already be dead. So we got that going for us.
“Charlie, mah throat’s dry and mah brow’s sweaty, so bring me scarves and water!”
“Not ‘What are you reading?’ but ‘What are you reading FOR?’”
“Goodbye, you lizard scum!”
Like or Dislike:
0 
1
1st October 2012 at 10:45 pm