This is the abomination. This is the wrath …
—W. H. Auden, For the Time Being
If, on account of the political situation, the press has become an increasingly incredible source of quite palpable frustration, if certain of our neighbors have become objects of suspicion, or have become, themselves, both irritable and suspicious, if our leaders address their glib monologues with relative success to the conspicuously inattentive, if the language of the tribe has been reduced to far fewer syllables, and the eyes of the tribe tend to glaze over at the first sign of a subordinate clause, that is our due. We have long desired that our confusions abate, regardless.
If certain travelers are now subject to untoward scrutiny, if their baggage, clothing, and orifices are all equally fair game, if the poor of other lands fail to figure in the calculus of the launch, and if our own poor alternate between suicidal rage and suicidal obesity, if the water carries a taste of tin, and our daily bread contagion, these too are just deserts. And yes, the pattern established by our lately narrower range of variables has attained the look and feel of permanence.
We have voted, and have agreed not to be reminded of the impractical illusions of an earlier time. Who can blame us? Who would dare? If we prefer the spoiled child’s temper to actual courage, prefer the pride of the cock to anything smacking of humility, if we prefer what we call justice to the demands of mercy, what is that to you?
The kingdom has come. We appear quite taken with it. For the time being, God’s will has acquiesced to our own, at least in this, the kingdom of anxiety, the only realm we care to know.
Scott Cairns is professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author most recently of Philokalia: New and Selected Poems (Zoo Press).
Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
