Poem number one:
Ozymandias, a poem about the ruins of a once-great civilization, now a wasteland, by Percy Booth Shelley.
Poem number two:
A poem in the same mood and subject, updated to Washington, D.C., by Claude.AI, an artificial intelligence application.
Authors in the Romantic period had a deep sense of the lost greatness and authenticity of Grecian, Roman, Egyptian, and other civilizations. They seemed grand, majestic, and natural, comparing them to life during the emerging Industrial Revolution, with its new machines. Oh, the lost glory, now come to ruins, while the current world is artificial and soul-less.
There is a new form of romanticism today. Artificial intelligence may be as revolutionary as the steam engine.
Right romanticism -- Make America Great Again -- looks back to the pre-Civil Rights era, before integration, before feminism, when White men were heads of households, when blue-collar jobs supported a wife, multiple children, a home, and a middle class life. To get there we need to clean out the institutions that administer this too-feminized, too-constraint-bound, too-woke unnatural world. We need a blunt courageous rule-breaker like Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry."
Trump's re-election was a validation and victory. It brings us springtime in romantic America of the political right. To be alive in this period is "very heaven" for MAGA. Pop-up stores are still selling Trump merchandise. Celebrate!
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| MAGA |
Romantics on the left are feeling glum. They look back at the earnest republicanism of Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson reflecting on a lost and better world. Biden, never great, lies defeated. There is a sad love-song feeling on the left after the election. The soulful man is on his way to Phoenix. A cake was left outside in the rain. It is ruined, and the recipe cannot be recreated. FDR's coalition is lost. Worse, the public doesn't even seem to care about America's greatest moment of public service and respect for democratic self-government, when George Washington returned power to the public. The obelisk is still there, and the painting is still on the Capitol rotunda wall, but now it depicts a quitter, a bad negotiator. Americans chose a winner instead.
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The Washington Monument, Claude.AI, 2024
I met a traveler from the western plain
Who said: Two crumbling walls of marble stand
Beside Potomac's waters, dark with stain.
Near them, collapsed upon the littered land,
Half-sunk, a splintered obelisk lies there,
Its fractured face still bearing words that read:
"Here stood the pride of freedom, built with care,
Here liberty's eternal flame was freed."
The rest lies scattered on the trampled ground
Where tourists snap their photos, unknowing,
Of how democracy,, once world-renowned,
Fell not to foes, but to their own unknowing--
The People's faith in truth had slipped away,
Till all their sacred trusts turned to decay.
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12 comments:
So, the majority of Americans think America was great in the pre-Civil Rights era when White men could beat their wives and lynch Blacks with impunity, and they’re stupid enough to imagine they can turn back the clock. Can this country be saved?
As a teenager, i fell in love with Shelley! And especially this poem.
The AI one also speaks to me.
It is not the loss of this former greatness that causes me to be sad, but the upcoming feats of the next administration and what will be undone.
oOPS the above is not by anonymous, but is by me.
A theme of “Ozymandias” and its AI imitator are decay, decline and loss, from a former position of putative greatness.
Set aside for now what “greatness” really means for MAGA types, and exactly when that greatness supposedly existed.
What undermines Democrats’ appeal to former greatness is that its modern base denies it ever existed, in any form.
The modern Left’s claim to moral superiority rests on casting the U.S as a nonpareil villain, and from its very outset.
Most Americans understand “All becomes dust”. But NOT, “Better for the world for Bad America to have never been”.
Many things, including the greatness of a country, are not black and white.
In the pre civil rights era, this country was the main force defeating Nazi Germany from the west. We achieved world dominance in a number of military tech technologies, including radar, fighter planes, and nuclear weapons.
We accomplished great things in World War II, and we were great.
But during that period, the civil rights situation was not great. That was work we still had to do.
The left seems to have a view of America as being totally bad, with no redeeming virtues. It’s no surprise that they don’t win elections with an attitude like that.
Nobody I know casts the U.S. "as a nonpareil villain, but it doesn't take an extensive knowledge of civics and history to realize it still has a long way to go before achieving its founding ideals. The question is whether all our efforts in that direction are about to be derailed.
The notion that the left views America as being totally bad, with no redeeming virtues, sounds like something Trump would say. America’s redeeming virtues are the principles enshrined in its founding documents. The true measure of a society’s greatness is in how it treats its most vulnerable members – something Trump would never say.
Trump says Democrats hate America, so it must be true.
Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, e.g.? Nikole Hannah-Jones and the all the simplistic yet influential America, West and Israel haters who view especially America as the sinister avatar of capitalism, Judeo-Christianity and colonialism, wellspring of humanity’s ills, geopolitical, economic, climate? For them and theirs on the Left, including half or so of America’s teaching academy, those “founding ideals” were but consciously-evil pretexts for pathological oppression and destruction. China, on the other hand, like the old USSR before it? Karl’s idea of social justice in action….
There are many “true measures“ of the greatness of a country.
If you only like what a country could become based on its principles, but you do not like the actual country that exists, that’s pretty conditional love, verging on something like abusive parenting.
Principles constitute abusive parenting? If you say so.
I don't know those folks. Most of those I do know are probably left of center, or what Republicans would call far left dirty commies, and we tend to view the U.S. as neither "evil" nor "the shining city upon a hill."
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