And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from…
He didn’t. At the end of 2002, when the campaign to go to war with Iraq commenced, I didn’t believe it [the part about the danger of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq]. I was eager to hear what Colin Powell had to say at the U.N., but I thought the case he made was weak – even though I didn’t yet know that what he was saying wasn’t even true. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t really completely get it until Judith Miller was jailed in the summer of 2005 that the whole Iraq War was based on lies and the twisted polemics of the group known as the neoconservatives. I guess before that, I thought they were just inept or misinformed.
By then, much of their damage was already done. They had marched us off to war. They’d infiltrated the Department of Justice and turned it into a political arm of their Party. They had invalidated Congress with Signing Statements, stacked the Supreme Court, shredded the Constitution’s system of checks and balances and right to privacy. By the time I awoke, the carnage was well underway – and I woke up kind of early. For many, it wasn’t until the Democratic Congress of 2006 began to hold hearings that exposed the extent of the wound. And it wasn’t until the recent months that we knew how they had ignored the looming catastrophe in our credit markets [as they collapsed around us]. Maybe we should have all known it in advance, but we didn’t. We count on our government to watch out for such things, or at least we used to. So their running up the National Debt and spending us into the ground with a senseless war were only preludes to what their inattention to our domestic and world finances has put on our table.
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present…
And so we’re hopefully going to elect a young man, an honest and bright young man, full of hope and change, to grapple with the legacy of the years that have followed the Cold War – a crippling and shameful legacy that will long be with us, certainly past my time. And now I’m an old man and things come wafting by from my past – the writings of Ayn Rand from my college years that lived on in a bug-eyed old man named Alan Greenspan; the specter of the Great Red Menace implicit in the fear-mongering of Rush Limbaugh and his likes; the Rovian guilt by association from what we call now the McCarthy Era; the music of the hippies that went flat and became the culture wars; the fear and deceit of Richard Nixon that pervades the Bush and Cheney White House; the naive and convoluted economics of the aging actor Ronald Reagan; and the hopes from Civil Rights days that sing in some of Barack Obama’s lyrics.
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
So it’s almost a time to rejoice – not just because something is finally going to be over. Eliot was right that there’s a lifetime burning in every moment and that to make and end is to make a beginning. The reason for rejoicing is that we are finally being offered another chance. The end is where we start from.
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern…
Your inter-reading of Eliot and current politics is startling and true. It’s time now to begin looking at the bigger picture, and the possibilities . . .
When those who cry out against the government as the source of all evil have to turn to government to bail them out of their own fiasco, then there is opportunity for major change.
And when