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| Yeats |
Dodd, Yeats and the
Liberal Postmortem
Former Connecticut US Senator Chris Dodd, retired from
politics since 2010, was and is a John F. Kennedy liberal Democrat. The breed
is fast diminishing.
Dodd remembers the exact moment he decided to leave
politics.
“On Dec. 24, 2009, Dodd, then 65, was looking back on one of
his hardest years in politics — and ahead to the prospect of an uncertain
reelection in 2010,” CTMirror tells us. Dodd’s approval
rating that year had plummeted and he was looking ahead to a grueling
reelection.
Finding he had some time to kill before boarding a flight to
Connecticut from Washington DC, Dodd decided to visit former US Senator Ted
Kennedy’s grave for the first time. “His resting place is marked by a simple
cross and a flat stone, and a pathway linking his grave to his brother’s had
not been built yet.
“‘I couldn’t find it,’ Dodd said. ‘And I’m sitting there,
and all of a sudden I said to myself, “Do you want to do this for seven more
years?” And I said, “No, that’s enough.”
That’s how long it took. That’s how much conversation I had about it. And I got
on the plane, went home, and I told Jackie and the kids. I said, ‘That’s
enough.’”
Dodd and President Joe Biden were very close friends over
the years. “On Sunday, July 21, while vacationing in Ireland, where Dodd has
owned a cottage for 30 years in rural Galway, the younger of Dodd’s two
college-aged daughters showed him a news alert on her phone: Biden was out,”
According to the CTMirror account.
“Dodd did not share how he took the news. But he and Biden,
both proud of their Irish ancestry, share an affinity for the poetry of William
Butler Yeats, who once wrote of prominent friends now gone, “Think where man’s
glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”
Perhaps Yeats’ rightly famous poem “The Second Coming” may be more appropriate to mark the end of a now
passed political alliance recollected in tranquility:
Turning and turning in
the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear
the falconer;
Things fall apart; the
center 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.
Yeats rarely wrote for his contemporaries. “The moment” is
the province of ink-stained wretches, not poets, who write for the ages.
In CTMirror’s telling, “Dodd said Thursday he recently was
reminded that he then took the unusual step of praising the GOP nominee, Sen.
Robert Dole of Kansas, the decorated and grievously wounded World War II
veteran,” during a political address.
“’So let me say to Senator Robert Dole, on behalf of the
thousands here in this United Center, thank you from a generation of Americans
living in freedom because of your sacrifices,’ Dodd said.
“The remark, and by extension Dole, got a standing ovation
from the Democrats.
“Last week, before heading for the airport and the Dominican
Republic, Dodd laughed as he recounted the moment. ‘I’m thinking [to] myself,
you know, boy, things have changed.’”
Yes indeed. The change is not incidental, a matter of momentary
bad manners. Bill Buckle4y once said, “The trouble with bad manners is that they
sometime lead to murder.”
The political changes in the United States, and elsewhere in
the world, touch upon the very nature of states and mankind. In bombing
Ukraine, proto-Stalinist Premier of Russia Vladimir Putin is not merely being
impolite, nor is Iran’s maximum leader, nor are the pro-Hamas, pro-Iranian
anarchists and democracy cannibals prowling the precincts of the Democrat
National Convention in Chicago.
Of these, Biden said in his concluding
remarks, “Those protesters out in the streets, they have a point. A lot of
innocent people are being killed on both sides.”
Yeats was much closer to the scalding truth. From the middle
20th into the 21st century, some center pole of
civilization has collapsed.
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.
In a less melancholic and more candid moment, Dodd, whose
political manners are impeccable, might have agreed that this year’s Democrat
National Convention is an unconventional convention like no other, if only
because Biden, who had been chosen as a presidential candidate by 14 million
primary voters was displaced at the last moment by Democrat presidential
candidate Kamala Harris, a relative political unknown who had not a single
primary vote to her credit. And, of course, the politician so rudely displaced
was Dodd’s very good friend about whom Yeats had written, “Think where man’s
glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”
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