Yeats', Second Coming, the Iraq war and irony...

Adam Cohen has an OpEd item in the NYTimes that is worth a good read for the bookishly inclined...or at least the bookishly inclined with a healthy sense of irony. He notes that the recent Brookings Institution report on the Iraq war is titled, "Things Fall Apart"...that Rep. Jim McDermott (D. WA) titled his speech calling for the administration to present a cogent plan for Iraq, "The Center Cannot Hold" and that blogs on the conflict are rife with "the blood-dimmed tide is loosed" in the Iraq (see here, here, here or here). Then there is one of my personal favorites, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

The common thread, of course, is that all come from W.B. Yeat's, 'Second Coming' and herein rests the irony. The pundits love to quote it...but don't seem to really understand it...or Yeats. Above and beyond the fact that he was far from a Christian (he considered Christianity "an idea whose time had passed"), and far from a democrat (he was a fan of Plato's benevolent dictatorship...or fascism), the poem is really "a powerful brief against punditry."

I offer the final few passages for your review and consideration:

The Christian era was about the ability to predict the future: the New Testament clearly foretold the second coming of Christ. In the post-Christian era of which Yeats was writing there was no Bible to map out what the next “coming” would be. The world would have to look toward Bethlehem to see what “rough beast” arrived.

This skepticism about predicting the future has more relevance to the Iraq war than any of the poem’s much-quoted first eight lines. The story of the Iraq war is one of confident predictions that never came to pass: “We will find weapons of mass destruction”; “we will be greeted as liberators”; “the insurgency is in its last throes.”

The confident predictors who have been wrong in the past do not hesitate to keep offering up plans. That is true of President Bush, certainly: he talks about what his “troop surge” will do as if he had never been wrong before. It is also true of the pundits. The co-author of “Things Fall Apart,” the Brookings guide to going forward in Iraq, is Kenneth Pollack, who is — incredibly — best known for his 2002 book “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.”

It is bizarre to see shards of “The Second Coming” appended to the Brookings report, or to any of the other plans and prognostications about the war in Iraq. Yeats, who grew up feeling “sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin,” did not just welcome whatever new order his rough beast was ushering in. He believed the only way it could plausibly be spoken of was in the form of a question.