Never Again - Nov 7 2024

 

Never Again

Nov 7 2024

When he said the end of history

I doubt he meant rewriting the past.

That is, the end of history

as we know it

   —  as if what we all took for granted

didn’t happen after all.

Or meant that history would end

by forgetting it entirely

  —  the memory hole

of Orwell’s imagining.

Rather, I think he envisioned the end

as a sunlit upland

of equality

prosperity

and enlightenment.

As a consensus

on how to govern ourselves

and what we value in life.

That at the end of history

we’d finally be done

with all the sturm und drang

and existential angst.

But the lessons of recent history

as well as the deeper past

leave me wondering

if we’ve actually progressed,

even if it’s just 2 steps ahead

while falling back 1.

So that the history

of civilized man

resembles a saw-edged graph

that keeps sloping ever upward

— somewhat erratic, but progress of a sort.

The way a drunk staggers out

after last call

but eventually makes it home.

Or instead of a line

trending steadily upward

as an arrow aims higher,

does history move in cycles?

A closed circle,

repeating over and over

the mistakes we failed to learn.

Or perhaps a pendulum

tick-tocking back and forth;

reacting,

over-correcting,

then changing direction again.

Because while we flatter ourselves

that we’ve become wiser

better informed

and more moral than before,

we’re still the same human beings

our forbears were;

no less hypocritical

cynical

or ill-informed,

with the same basic instincts

intrinsic flaws.

And neither are we that far removed

from our primate progenitors,

with whom

as with the chimpanzees and apes

so much DNA is shared;

competing for status and mates,

defending turf,

deferring

to the chest-beating egoists.

So now, in a 21st century

that threatens to reprise the 20th

as if no lessons were learned,

it would seem the end of history

is one of both:

rewriting, as well as forgetting.

Of self-serving leaders

who selectively edit the past,

while young people

know little of this century

let alone the last;

of its wars, fascism, genocides

and strong-man rule.

That’s “genocides”, plural:

we may have vowed never again

but somehow still did.

Or will the end of history

be none of these?

Instead, might it end altogether,

in whatever man-made calamity

we sleepwalk into?

Perhaps a nuclear exchange

or climate change,

a pandemic

as deadly as the last

but managed even worse.

And all because

we never learned

and failed to take care.

Counting down the days

until no one remembers

because no one’s even left.

Another poem inspired by Trump. This time post-election.

The original title was "Francis Fukuyama", after the academic who became famous for coining the phrase the end of history. What I understand he meant was a consensus about steady progress toward  a more equal world of democracy, globalism, and the liberal international order. (Although if he also had in mind capitalism -- that is, our current consumerist growth dependent sort of capitalism -- then I would take issue. Consumerism and perpetual growth are unsustainable. A market economy -- if it's unregulated, unenlightened, and libertarian -- is unsustainable. And not just in the long run!) 

A man who is not only largely ignorant the past (as well as much else!) and twists what he does know, but is actually shameless enough to brazenly rewrite the present! His ability to lie and distort are pathological. Maybe even to the extent of fooling himself into truly believing. Although I see in Trump far more self-serving cynicism than delusion. Not to mention, as the poem says, the archetype of the chest-beating egoist.

And an electorate that either isn’t paying attention (people, after all, lead busy difficult lives, and have neither the time nor the energy to keep up with the news), or doesn’t known enough about the past to be scared (the failure of our schools to teach history and civics, let alone media literacy and critical thinking skills). Or worse, doesn’t care.

So while we are happily distracting ourselves, political discourse is coarsened, democracy under threat, the international order destabilized, and authoritarians everywhere encouraged. Out of ignorance, we risk letting ourselves slip back into the 1930s: a repeat of fascism, protectionist trade wars, and lost prosperity.

Which would be consistent with a cyclic view of history. Except that now, the existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change loom. The end of history for real.

I find that this sort of poem is more suited to prose. So these are the hardest to get right. Saying not too much and not too little, while getting it to land just so on the tongue and ear. It can be a push/pull between prosody and content.