The Four Horsemen of Tomorrow’s Apocalypse
If they haven’t done so already, the economics professors from the bible colleges will be throwing their arms wide and proclaiming the apocalypse. And rightly so. Circle the week of May 2nd on your calendars because our dear leaders have lost the center and the four horsemen are now carpet bombing the Eurozone.
Memo to our economics professors: these riders don’t stand for pestilence, war, famine, and death – we already have a surplus of these biblical ills. No, the horsemen of tomorrow’s apocalypse stand for delusion (as in the leaders of the West), bankruptcy (as in global), depletion (as in oil) and terrorism (as in Times Square).
For months, the Obama mouthpieces have been telling us that the worst is over; then the stock market falls a thousand points in one day and wipes out the market’s ill gotten 2010 gains. Greece is functionally bankrupt and will topple many of the banks that have collectively loaned 11 million Greeks over $300 billion dollars. The demographic math on Greece’s debt proves that we made a profound mistake by placing our nation in the hands of the Federal Reserve. After the ancient pillar of democracy falls, Spain, Portugal, the UK and then finally us will soon follow. BP’s petroleum engineers, the real gods of our civilization, can’t figure out how to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and oil prices which have mysteriously crashed in the last week will begin to climb and kill off any green shoots that survive the next down leg. And then there is Terrorism, which has been circling the globe alone since 9/11.
If you could hear the horses, they would certainly say: “The blood- dimmed tide is loosed.” This line is from the “The Second Coming,” a poem written by William Butler Yeats almost a century ago, after World War One consumed the flower of a European generation. As for what comes after these horsemen flying this way, who knows? Unfortunately, Jesus has been showing up only at Christmas, usually in the malls.
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?
