Of Poetry, Prophecy, and History

In 1968, the poet Robert Bly wrote:

America is still young herself, and she may become something magnificent and shining, or she may turn, as Rome did, into a black dinosaur, the enemy of every nation in the world who [sic] wants to live its own life. In my opinion, that decision has not yet been made.

Bly, American Poetry, (1990): 254.

Four decades earlier, another American poet, Robinson Jeffers was less optimistic:


While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening
center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught – they say –
God, when he walked on earth.

Of the two, I would say Jeffers had the better sense of history.

But even today, we find an important historian like Chalmers Johnson (whose trilogy chronicling the most recent phase of American imperialism--Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire; The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic; Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic--belongs on the book-shelf of every true American patriot) pretends to be exposing the recent loss of our republic.

Even those willing to acknowledge publicly the true state of affairs are incapable of admitting that the insights they retail as news are, in fact, several generations stale.

One could cite the Monroe Doctrine of 1823; the doctrine of Manifest Destiny expounded in the 1840's; the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1898; Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to the Monroe doctrine announced in 1904, etc.

To the poorly educated American, such milestones are the stuff of ancient history.

But those who know better ought to be more candid.

The American republic has been legendary for longer than it was a reality--if, in fact, it ever was a reality.

Perhaps the book to read now is Clay Jenkinson's Becoming Jefferson's People: Re-Inventing the American Republic in the Twenty-First Century.

A worthy book, were it not for the fact that it was written two centuries too late.