Radio Free New Hampshire: Slouching Towards Washington

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

The journalist Teddy White visited the White House to interview Dwight Eisenhower. They told him to wait in the Oval Office. Ike was criticized in his time for being too passive. His military background made it natural for him to delegate authority. His distaste for politics often seemed like an unwillingness to cope with ugly disputes. His lack of loquaciousness made for charges of being tongue-tied and worse (the Democratic party’s weakness for intellectuals may well have started with Adlai Stevenson). White was not immune from sharing in those disappointments. Yet as he waited for the general to appear, he found himself strangely touched. The president’s desk was tidy. The papers in sight were piled neatly. A pair of reading glasses lay folded on top of them. Eisenhower eventually entered. He had been outside, practicing his golf. White developed the pleasing sense that things were under control.

That must have been nice.

The news cycle will not slow down, and it’s ironic to think of poetry when considering the presidency of Donald Trump, the least poetic president our country has ever known. But Yeats has a way of applying in these harsh modern times. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

Of late, Trump’s widening gyre has included such items as naked attempts to enrich his family (by pushing to close his own federal tax case), naked attempts to enrich his supporters (by trying to establish a slush fund for them; not even his fellow Republicans could let that succeed), more attacks on science and technology (coal plants encouraged, weather beacons in the Pacific discontinued, extra muscle being used against our universities, for whom it remains hard to feel much sympathy), and weird passes at decorating stuff (building unnecessary arches, plastering his face on currency, painting reflecting pools blue). It’s too much for two weeks and we haven’t even mentioned Ukraine or California. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

Some recent developments border on the absurd. These past few weeks have seen the run-up to his birthday, which he has chosen to conflate with our nation’s birthday, and which he plans to celebrate by hosting cage fights on the White House lawn. Whether this constitutes pandering hardly seems to matter. It’s likely no different from his McDonald’s habit. This president enjoys drama, he does not mind if it’s fake, and the more extreme, the better. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

Themes of deceit, self-dealing, and instant gratification continue to overwhelm any sense that this man promotes progress in important affairs, so the tragedy of his administration deepens. Where it works, it works by happenstance; as imperfect as it is, Venezuela seems to be inching away from its past, Cuba is nearing a similar reckoning, and Mexico is not far behind. But those three places seem to fall under Marco Rubio’s watch. While that bodes well for the Republican party’s future, it fails to provide much promise for the next two years. Yeats’s warning has rarely held more currency. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

This tragedy is clearer in Iran than anywhere else. The existing situation was untenable and global structures were useless in dealing with it. The time was ripe for new thinking. Trump had the ambition to make changes; he had valid goals; he had the will to act. But he alienated our allies, he underestimated our enemies, and he lacks the patience to deal with setbacks.

Even more importantly, when he made a feint at declaring patience necessary by denigrating his opponents’ concern for short-term gas prices, those same opponents attacked him. Trump is not the only politician whose horizon gets measured by the morning ratings. People will do anything to fight him. Our body politic snarls when it sees its own image in the mirror. Yeats wrote his classic poem (“The Second Coming”) in the aftermath of the First World War, when men had contended with machines and lost, when soldiers had died because tactics could not cope with technology, when governments had proven rudderless and overmatched by events. He saw his time as the end of one era and the beginning of another. His eras were thousands of years long; ours are no more than decades. Yet it still feels new, and new things are raw. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.