"Rage, rage against the dying of the light . . ."
It seems that with each day’s - each hour’s? - headline, breaking news or revelation, the world we live in becomes increasingly - maddeningly - incomprehensible; one providing far more question marks than exclamation points. Indeed, as Macbeth moaned at news of his wife’s death “. . . all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death . . . It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28). One simply cannot wallow in any darker, more shadowy passion. I deeply apologize for beginning this essay in such a tenebrous manner . . . especially in light of the fact that it is being crafted just hours before the nation’s 244th birthday . . . when history and hot dogs are supposed to be consumed beneath “the rockets’ red glare.” But these are different days; our country, our world, has become demented with pandemic, with spineless dishonesty, rudderlessness of epic proportion and a noxious need to blame others for nearly anything we cannot abide.
Here in the United States we seem to be moving ever faster and farther into our opposing corners. In one corner we have the overt violence of racists, white supremacists, “boogaloo bois” and the conspirators of “QAnon” calling for a second Civil War; in the other, groups and individuals urging a coming together of people of different colors and backgrounds . . . of a revival of e pluribus unum (the nation’s motto given to us by Benjamin Franklin . . . Latin for “Out of many comes one”). To be honest, historically, America has long had its contentious factions: Federalists v. Whigs; slave-owners v. abolitionists; blue-bloods v. immigrants; Democrats v. Republicans. The big difference, it seems to me is that today, there are simply far, far more forms of mass (“social”) media putting our differences under the glare of far far too many terawatts.
As I started blocking out this essay a line from the late Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) came to mind. It comes from a poem he wrote in 1947 (when he was 33 years old) entitled Do not go gentle into that good night. (It was not published until 1951.) This, his masterpiece, was described in part by one critic as “. . . a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit.” Written shortly after his beloved father died, Thomas’ villanelle reads, in part:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
It has always been a favorite of mine. And more importantly, the verse about “raging against the dying of the light” has long been a watchword for me - especially when it comes to politics. I have long been of the opinion that like boxing, politics has become less and less of an art form and more and more a type of mortal combat. The further on in time we get, the more seems to be at stake - and not just in terms of ideology. Our elected officials - from city council to county commission to Congress and ultimately the White House is, except in increasingly rare cases, the purview of the the wealthy . . . those who pay for the campaigns and, when all is said and done, make victory possible. They are the ones who play the tune and set the metronomes; they are the ones to whom oh so many politicians must do the bidding. As rich as he claims to be, ‘45 is still a puppet, a cats-paw of those who, even while despising him, find him to be both malleable and useful. So far as I can tell, Boss Tweet serves precisely two masters: those who make contributions to his campaigns, and his own vaunted sense of self . . . much of which is fueled by dire insecurity. And this is where Dylan Thomas comes back in to the essay.
Statistically, it is obvious that a majority - slim though it may truly be - of the American public is increasingly on to the many larcenous, libidinous and flat out lying tropes of the nation’s 45th president and his “acting” staff of underlings. Yes, there are certainly those who will gladly follow him to the very gates of Hell, believing their portals to be overlaid with gems and not hydrofluoric acid. They are the ones who don’t seem to have a problem supporting a lewd, crude dude just so long as he is the antithesis of his predecessor. But ultimately they are wrong; they have been fooled . . . perhaps willingly, perhaps not. They are, to reemploy Secretary Clinton’s difficult term, "deplorables.” These are the ones, both in government and standing out on the streets sans masks and brandishing the signs and weapons of self-created victimhood, who reject the wisdom of science and lessons of experts; who have their eyes avariciously focused on today at the expense of our many tomorrows; and are world-class champs in the game of blame. Left to their own devices the skies have become perceptively darker and more dangerous; our union is in peril.
It is up to those of us who seek a more perfect union, who are both embarrassed and humiliated by the manchild of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who has deluded himself into believing he speaks in our name to the rest of the world to send him packing; to "rage against the dying of the light.”
Please, please, I beg you a thousand times over. You must vote. Qvetching (that’s Yiddish for “bellyaching”) is obviously not enough. You must send in your vote-by-mail, absentee ballot or even brave the same-day ballot box, and vote out both ‘45 and all those Republicans who support him. Don’t simply delete all those emails from various candidates begging for a few campaign dollars here, a few campaign dollars there. Not only must he be defeated; he must be overwhelmingly defeated. For if Joe Biden only wins in a squeaker, there is every reason to believe that ‘45 will declare the final tally to be fraudulent and then, like the conspiracy dreamed up by novelist Phillip Roth in his haunting 2004 novel The Plot Against America refuse to leave the White House. Just yesterday, former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth published an ominous op-ed in Newsweek suggesting that ‘45 and his political strategists might already have a plot in mind to keep their boss from having to cede his position . . . through a combination of voter suppression, the purging of voter rolls (especially in urban centers with higher percentages of minority voters) and fiddling around with precisely how the Electoral College does its work. Assuming the worst, the only possible way to defeat this plot . . . as stated above . . . is to defeat Boss Tweet by a historically “yuge” margin.
If we are going to succeed at bringing back the sun, we must not “. . . go gentle into that good night,” but rather “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
It’s our nation, our world, our future to conquer and to preserve.
There are precisely 122 days left until November 3, 2020.
Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone
Copyright©1951 Dylan Thomas