As often happens whenever I write something (besides the usual and starkly unoriginal opprobrium) I am reminded by a friend and former teacher of mine of something so entirely appropriate that I can do no better than offer it here for your consideration. (Thanks, once again, to Dan Walsh.)

In my most recent piece, https://atomic-temporary-37778625.wpcomstaging.com/2025/08/28/heres-your-chance-mr-president/, I suggested a path to the Nobel Peace Prize by our dear leader. Difficult as it was to cloak my contempt for the man, it leaked through.

Ah well, this loathing runs deep and is unlikely to be assuaged until his none-too-soon departure. Perhaps if we offered the Peace Prize in exchange for his resignation…ah, but why waste time on such an unlikely event, no matter how attractive.

In the ensuing comments war between those who sought only to launch ad hominem attacks devoid of any actual counterarguments, other than the usual pablum of blind devotion and oft-repeated falsehoods, and those who agreed with me, my friend and former teacher offered the perfect example of what we face today.

…The best lack all conviction, while the worst  
Are full of passionate intensity…

W.B. Yates, The Second Coming

Now, for those of you who never developed an appreciation for poetry (other than those popular lyrical “There once was a man from Nantucket… type), I would ask you to make an effort to see the prescient message in the words.

William Butler Yates, an Irish poet–and the world knows Irish poets are the best–wrote these words in the aftermath of World War I, fearing the rise of anarchy, chaos, and fascism, but they may be more apropos to our own dire circumstances.

The Second Coming
W.B. Yates

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?