Thoughts On The Rough Beast

 

It seems each day brings with it some new freakish incident, threat or claim in these sad times.  I doubt even Suetonius, who wrote of the peculiarities of the Julio-Claudian emperors, could imagine some of the grotesqueries being perpetrated and paraded in front of us by our ubiquitous media.  Whether it's merely ridiculous, like requiring public servants to wear outsized shoes, or actively fostering fear and chaos, those in power seem to be determined either to commit outrages or slavishly support them.

W. B. Yeats believed that the First World War overturned our civilization and deprived us of the traditions and morals on which it was founded, presaging an apocalypse of some kind or another.  So, he wondered what Rough Beast would be born of it.  The 20th century was full of beasts, and so Yeats was right to expect them.  But no Second Coming was forthcoming, as was the case with the many Second Comings which have been predicted by the self-righteous over the centuries.

Could Yeats have imagined a Rough Beast that was destructive of civilized values but merely vulgar, rude, scatterbrained, blustering, ignorant, self-centered as a spoiled child, albeit cunning in a shabby way?  I doubt it.  Yeats was a great poet and evoked beauty and described evil, but in a superlative sense.  I'm not sure he would have believed an apocalypse might be caused by crude, malicious but otherwise unremarkable people put in charge of forces capable of wrecking havoc on the world.

We had to wait for someone like Orwell to tell us that the beasts to be feared most are those who are not great in any sense, are unworthy, even contemptible, but are raised by the corruption of our society to the highest places and are tolerated and even encouraged by those who are part of the corruption.

It's difficult to think, like Yeats, that the current Rough Beasts have beliefs contrary to those which form the bases of Western civilization.  In fact they value what has always been of the greatest importance in the West; money and its relentless acquisition.  Money, of course, is power, which has also been desired.  And they also rely on hypocrisy and purported adherence to so-called Judeo-Christian morals, at least in public, another characteristic of our civilization. 

The Rough Beast no longer slouches towards Bethlehem, but marches against it, and lays siege to it.