Oh yeah, things fall apart

 

The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats 

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: somewhere in sands of the desert  
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  
Reel 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?

Not what I was going to write about, but it seems apposite.
 
Has anybody else noticed the stretching of bonds? I think of dough, when you pull it and pull it elongated holes start to appear. You know that at some point that the dough is going to tear itself asunder under its own weight, and it's kind of fun to watch, but sad when it happens. However, to continue with the analogy, then you gather it all up, reshape it differently and start again.
    
Whose the hands and what the shape?

We’ve moved past the stage when we were all gung-ho about how dolphins were swimming in Venice and how happy Greta Thunberg must be, to worrying about the non-recyclable nature of disposable face masks. We have nobody to talk to about such things, or only the same people we have been talking to for the past ten months, because we have learned that talking isn’t just talking otherwise Zoom wouldn’t leave us with a sensation of undernourished weariness. Talking is smelling, moving around, touching, listening, hearing. It’s piano and forte, it’s a whole-body activity. It often goes with walking, or eating, or playing, or making love, or bumping into somebody known or unknown. It’s a thing we do when we congregate, and we can’t congregate, because if we congregate we are risking not only our own lives but the lives of those we love and those we have never met.

What unadulterated fun it must have been to storm the Capitol and stick it to the man! How I wish I could have been part of such a joyful crowd of deluded racists!, Problem is I’m not a deluded racist. You have to be pretty bloody deluded to think that humans, who, with the honourable exception of those that live in New Zealand, are not capable of predicting that vaccination roll-out would require some planning or that contradictory messaging gets people confused and pissed off, have the capacity and the cohesion to mount a vast secret operation to conceal, alter and falsify hundreds of thousands of votes across a country where it depends on your geographic location whether you can turn left on a red light or not. De Gaulle complained of trying to govern a country with 258 different cheeses. Imagine what it’s like trying to govern a country that 160 years after the Civil War still doesn’t agree on what flag to wave. The strategic planning and single-mindedness that would be necessary to mount a coup by ballot box are unimaginable  when you only have to get a speeding ticket in a state different from the one in which your licence was granted to know that nationwide coordination is not an American strength.

I wonder what the human ball of dough will look like when it is reshaped.