Thursday
As we await final vote tallies from a handful of states, I’ve come across a couple of poetic allusions that I appreciate. I love the tweet (author unknown) that riffs off of the final lines of T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” a poem that I have applied to Trump’s enablers
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a WI/MI/PA.
In other words, Trump appears ready to go out with a whimper rather than a dramatic bang, what with his complaints about non-existent voter fraud, his frivolous lawsuits, his premature victory declaration, and his pleas to the Supreme Court to stop absentee vote counts (but only in states where he is ahead). In the end, I suspect, he will slink from the scene, skipping Biden’s inauguration.
Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg News, meanwhile, alluded to Matthew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.” In this 1850 poem, the poet is a tourist seeking refuge in the Grand Chartreuse monastery from his capitalistic, machine-driven society. As he watches the monks go about their prayerful routines, he believes he is witnessing a society that is passing away:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side.
Wilkinson writes,
The state of U.S. politics is dangerous dysfunction. A new nation is struggling to be born. An old nation is doing all it can to make it a stillbirth. And the toll of that struggle is rising.
To be sure, Wilkinson is less ambivalent about the new nation than Arnold. He is a liberal excited by the new order whereas Arnold is a conservative threatened by change (like many of Trump’s evangelical supporters):
If Biden prevails, as seems increasingly likely, and the Republicans hold the Senate, Republicans will devote themselves to using the Senate to destroy Biden’s presidency.
There is an enormous grassroots churning in the U.S. right now, from Black Lives Matter to suburban women organizing their neighborhoods. A future is coming into view. Yes, the anti-majoritarian Senate and Electoral College are serious impediments. But scores of millions of Americans voted for Trump.
In his most famous poem, Arnold describes being “on a darkling plain,/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.” It would be a false equivalence to say that Trump and anti-Trump voters are equally ignorant, but, yes, there has been a lot of clashing in a dark time.
