From 1939 to February 23, 2022

Eighty three and a half years ago, on September 1, 1939,  Hitler launched a successful military attack on Poland, initiating a set of events that ended with a nuclear attack on Japan, trials against German officials for crimes against humanity, the creation of NATO and the UN, and the emergence of the US as the Top Dog in the world.  

Top Dog status will not last forever, and, indeed, the attack yesterday on Ukraine is part of a deliberate effort on the part of one of losers of the past 33 years, Russia, to challenge the institutions created in 1945 to stabilize, reasonably well, what might be called the Century of US Supremacy.  Eventually, probably within the next three or four decades, China will assume top dog status, and we hope this change will not, as is usually the case, require a World War to initiate China's ascendancy.  It may well be that Putin's long-term goal is to hasten the West's demise as a coherent community, along with the democratic values and other irritants that still motivate energetic support throughout the West--and, like an obsequious servant, offer the scrapheap to his new Chinese masters in return for desired privileges.  

American political leadership for the past third of a century, in exemplary, if mindless, bipartisan fashion, has contributed to the permissive atmosphere that emboldened Putin.  Historians will not give many free passes here:  leadership led us astray with hyperpartisanship, a shift away from our founding fathers' trust in ordinary peoples' ability to evaluate things on their own, and a fanatic refusal to address pressing problems of ordinary governance here at home.  The piper will be paid.  The bill is coming due.

This is, for the first time since World War II, a tragic situation.  We have moved from the political farce--equally shared by two major parties--of the past few years to tragedy.  None of us will completely escape the scope of needless sorrow that is to come.  Let us hope it will bring out the best in each of us. 

I have posted a piece of the poem, September 1, 1939, by WH Auden, here a couple of times.  It was written as tanks and storm troops were occupying Poland.  Today it seems appropriate to post part of it again.

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night….

….All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.