Feature

Michael Davidow

By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire

The reporter Teddy White once called at the White House to speak with Dwight Eisenhower and was directed to wait inside the Oval Office. Eisenhower drew criticism in his era for seeming overly detached. His army experience led him to assign duties readily. His dislike of political wrangling looked like avoidance of unpleasant fights. His reserved speech invited claims that he was inarticulate and worse (the Democratic tilt toward thinkers may have begun with Adlai Stevenson). White shared some of those reservations. Yet while waiting he felt oddly moved. The desk sat neat and clear. Papers stood stacked in tidy piles. A pair of reading glasses rested folded on top. Eisenhower arrived after practicing golf outdoors. White came away with the reassuring impression that affairs were firmly handled.

That must have been nice.

The news cycle keeps racing ahead, and it feels strange to invoke poetry when reflecting on Donald Trump’s presidency, perhaps the least lyrical our nation has seen. Still, Yeats often speaks to these difficult modern moments. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

Trump’s widening gyre lately has featured open efforts to benefit his relatives (by seeking to end his own federal tax inquiry), open efforts to reward his backers (by proposing a cash reserve for them; even fellow Republicans blocked that move), further strikes against science and technology (coal facilities promoted, Pacific weather stations shut down, added pressure placed on universities, which remain difficult to pity), and odd gestures at ornamentation (erecting needless arches, stamping his likeness on money, tinting reflecting pools blue). It is a great deal for two weeks, and that leaves aside Ukraine and California. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

Some recent moves verge on the ridiculous. The past weeks brought preparations for his birthday, which he has decided to merge with the country’s own, planning cage matches on the White House lawn. Whether this counts as pandering hardly seems relevant. It may be no different from his fondness for McDonald’s. This president likes spectacle, does not mind if it is staged, and prefers it more extreme. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

Patterns of deception, self-interest, and quick reward keep crowding out any notion that this leader advances key matters, so the sorrow of his term grows deeper. Where it succeeds, success arrives by chance; imperfect as it is, Venezuela appears to be edging from its past, Cuba approaches a similar moment, and Mexico is not far behind. Those three nations seem to fall under Marco Rubio’s gaze. While that augurs well for the Republican future, it offers little hope for the coming two years. Yeats’s caution has seldom seemed more apt. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

This sorrow shows clearest in Iran. The prior arrangement could not last and global bodies proved useless against it. The moment called for fresh ideas. Trump possessed the drive to alter course; he held legitimate aims; he showed readiness to move. Yet he distanced allies, misjudged foes, and cannot abide delays.

Still more telling, when he tried to argue that patience mattered by dismissing critics’ focus on short-term fuel costs, those same critics assailed him. Trump is not alone in seeing his horizon set by morning ratings. People will do anything to oppose him. Our political body growls at its own reflection. Yeats composed his famous poem (“The Second Coming”) after the First World War, when men had fought machines and failed, when troops perished because old tactics could not match new weapons, when governments proved directionless and overwhelmed. He viewed his age as the close of one epoch and the start of another. His epochs spanned thousands of years; ours last only decades. Yet it still feels novel, and novel things are unformed. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.