Russel Norman

A rough beast slouching towards Wellington?

by Russel Norman

Chris Trotter has used his column in the Sunday Star Times to argue that National’s slipup over caps on GPs’ fees and the sale of SOEs revealed the true National Party. He finishes with the line: “But, now we’ve seen these masters of deception vexed to nightmare by a colleague’s indiscretion, we know, for certain, that it’s the same National beast that slouches towards Wellington to be reborn.” Which got me looking for the original poem by Yeats, and here it is. 

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: somewhere in the 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?

Quite a poem. John Key is no rough beast; he is a human being like Helen Clark and deserving of respect like any human being. But if the Nats want to launch part three of the new right revolution, then this kind of rhetoric will just be the beginning.

Published in Environment & Resource Management by Russel Norman on Sun, September 30th, 2007   

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