Slouching Toward Bethlehem

I don't write vampire novels, but in my everlasting quest for two wrongs that make a right I woke up this morning wondering what a Zombie Jabberwock would look like. Lady GaGa, of course. Gotta love that Monster Lady, but... if you deconstruct da Ga, don't you get Hillary Clinton?

I mean after all, that dude ranch in Occupied Palestine has thermonuclear weapons, so maybe we can get a reel life pieces agreement this time around, pardon my Snark? Considering the undertow in Iran? The H-Bomb? The old Deep Tan?

What good is a hundred or a thousand megatons if you're as teeny tiny as Israel^†? How far can you run before you run out of landscape and try to hide in nonsense? No wonder the Apocalypse is so eagerly awaited by the Jerry Falwell loons in this country. It's imminent.

Here's the thing. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, once the Soviets started assailing our sense of cultural superiority with the Bolshoi Ballet, we started believing that whatever else they might be, the Rooskies weren't insane and had a strong sense of self-preservation.

But it's so-o-o hard not to build the bomb. It turns out the Manhattan Project was overkill, or at least Cold War propaganda, because once you've got the basics (believed to have been delivered to the Russians on a few papers hidden in a Kleenex box), the bomb itself is about as complicated as a devilsfood cupcake.

Even Israel can do it. But then, the world has gone mad, and the Boojum is upon us. We knew that, right?

^†Israel is one-half a Belgium, just about.

---

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

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?