And once empires fall, no one really cares anymore about the wonderful, obsequious biographies or praise-songs written about the fearless leaders. Heck, folks are lucky if anyone even speaks the old language anymore. (Psst, have you heard about Chinglish?). Better luck with the flattering portraits. Except, maybe they aren't that flattering, after all:
OZYMANDIAS
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Yeah, Western Civilization's a bitch. And that's one of its masterpieces.
What was that Tom Friedman said? Oh, yeah, "Suck. On. This."
Except.
The problem is that Ozymandias wasn't the only one to suffer for his endless hubris. That's where you and I come in. And, of course, Barack Obama, and all the other feckless Democrats in Washington, DC.
They're still shadowboxing with the fear of Bush's ghost, afraid to even think of taking on the real thing. Meanwhile, the entire edifice is falling all around them.
There is a widespread misperception that folks like me represent a politically radical perspective. That's quite mistaken. Oh, sure I am a political radical. But I know full well that America's radical political tradition is far too weak in standard political terms to carry any weight. It takes us a good two generations to get anything done--such abolishing slavery--and then whatever we accomplish is quickly turned inside out, and takes another 100 years to get set right.
And so when I speak like this, it may be because I'm a radical that I'm even looking in this direction. But what I see has nothing to do with accomplishing any radical goals. It's simply a matter of civilizational survival. Which means: - A stimulus package large enough and targetted enough (investments and social service spending, not more trickle-down tax cuts) to get us out of this recession-on-the-verge-of-depression.
- A global warming action program drastic enough to actually avoid the worst of global warming.
- A reorientation of our foreign policy so that we stop making enemies at ten times the birth rate of the Muslim world.
These are not radical, or even progressive ideas anymore. They are simply matters of survival. They are pragmatism incarnate.
They are--dare I say it?--conservative proposals, designed to preserve order and provide stability and continuity.
Alas, the people calling themselves "conservatives" these days are crazed reactionaries, and the entire political spectrum is still fundmantally in its thrall.
That's what happens when empires fall.
In mid-December, I wrote a diary, "Elite Education And America's Failed Civilization", in which I quoted copiously from an article by Chris Hedges, "The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff". In it, he wrote about privileged students in elite universities:
They may have known the plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," but they were unable to tell you why the story was important. Their professors, fearful of being branded political and not wanting to upset the legions of wealthy donors and administrative overlords who rule such institutions, did not draw the obvious parallels with Iraq and American empire. They did not use Conrad's story, as it was meant to be used, to examine our own imperial darkness. And so, even in the anemic world of liberal arts, what is taught exists in a moral void.
But it's not just "The Heart of Darkness". That's just about one man, one small encounter in the imperial enterprise.
It's not about the end of it all. It's nowhere near as sweeping and final as "Ozymandias". And it wasn't just Shelley who warned us, you know. He wasn't alone.
You, Andrew Marvell
And here face down beneath the sun
Here upon Earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:
To feel creep up the curving East
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
upon those underlands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow
And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change
And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travellers in the Westward pass
And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
of evening widen and steal on
And deepen in Palmyra's street
The wheel-rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown
And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls
And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land
Nor now the long light on the sea:
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on...
-- Archibald MacLeish |
