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This Is as American as a Model-T Ford
The beast is not slouching towards Minneapolis. It's always been here.
When I finally got to sleep in the whiskey hours of early Friday morning, a police station in Minneapolis had been occupied and burned, and well-prepared demonstrators were firing sky rockets in triumph, a celebratory fillip unfamiliar to my experience, but understandable in its symbolic necessity. In Louisville, seven people were said to have been shot at another demonstration protesting the killing of a different African-American citizen by a different police force. And I awoke Friday morning to watch an entire CNN crew get led away in handcuffs on live television for the apparent crime of doing its job. Take it away, Mr. Yeats.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
But, to pursue this poem to its famous ending, there is no question as to what rough beast slouches through America these days, and it is not preparing to be born but, rather, it has never died. It stalked the Virginia night with Nat Turner and the streets of Charleston with Denmark Vesey. It fed itself on violence in Watts, and Newark, and Detroit, and Los Angeles. We are always shocked when it reappears. The beast is as American a product as Spam or a Model-T Ford. We should not be shocked. We should be as familiar with this beast as we are with the veins in our arm, as Ahab says to Starbuck.
We should have been expecting the beast’s arrival for some time. The country elected an adopted and spoiled child of the beast. He was very much the son of his father. Even in the middle of the night on Thursday, he leaped to the electric Twitter machine to sing hosannas to the beast from the highest seat in the temple of government....
When I finally got to sleep in the whiskey hours of early Friday morning, a police station in Minneapolis had been occupied and burned, and well-prepared demonstrators were firing sky rockets in triumph, a celebratory fillip unfamiliar to my experience, but understandable in its symbolic necessity. In Louisville, seven people were said to have been shot at another demonstration protesting the killing of a different African-American citizen by a different police force. And I awoke Friday morning to watch an entire CNN crew get led away in handcuffs on live television for the apparent crime of doing its job. Take it away, Mr. Yeats.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
But, to pursue this poem to its famous ending, there is no question as to what rough beast slouches through America these days, and it is not preparing to be born but, rather, it has never died. It stalked the Virginia night with Nat Turner and the streets of Charleston with Denmark Vesey. It fed itself on violence in Watts, and Newark, and Detroit, and Los Angeles. We are always shocked when it reappears. The beast is as American a product as Spam or a Model-T Ford. We should not be shocked. We should be as familiar with this beast as we are with the veins in our arm, as Ahab says to Starbuck.
We should have been expecting the beast’s arrival for some time. The country elected an adopted and spoiled child of the beast. He was very much the son of his father. Even in the middle of the night on Thursday, he leaped to the electric Twitter machine to sing hosannas to the beast from the highest seat in the temple of government....
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a32711552/minneapolis-protests-riots-police-station-fireworks/