In reading the transcript of a polisci conference session on Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, I find a gem in Paul Krugman’s opening remarks.
[There's a] Walker Percy novel with a near future setting, a dystopian scenario, in which he said, `As things fell apart, the center did not hold; however the GDP continued to rise.’
Some of us will say, “GDP is up. Who cares about the center, whatever that is.” Others in tense laughter announce our concern.
See WB Yeats “The Second Coming” (1920)
- 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 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?
