The times, we are told, keep flowing like a river, perhaps the stream we cannot step into twice. Reading those changes aright can make a man wealthy, scrying them correctly half the time grants a man the reputation of wisdom, and being mostly wrong, but eloquent, allows ze to write for the Atlantic.
The words of such prophets have been written on subway walls, even tenement halls, but there the failed prophet should treasure the sound of silence. This is the poet (God save me!) who sees Portents in every change and weeps for an age without romance when he learns those Millenials are killing ketchup consumption.
This Means Something and the Something that it means will (almost) always equal Doom. Why is this?
Doom, as every speaker at a homeschool convention knows, sells. There is no need to solve good times and so few books to be written or stored food to be hawked.
Cheer is so silly sounding: Whiggery may be correct, things might be getting better, but a jeremiad, even if wrong, attracts attention partly because Whiggery is called Whiggery.
We must act standing as we do at Armageddon battling for the continued consumption of ketchup or some other cultural portent. This is almost always nonsense and has produced a good deal of bad music, poetry, and New York Times articles.
We will not be naive and read the tea leaves correctly, despite the fact that the tea leaves are the leaves of tea and nothing to be read. The reactionary sees decay in every change and the revolutionary portents of unheaval. Both see epoch meaning in every day’s paper: one with gloom, the other with glee.
One poet of doom was particularly bad at both prediction and poetry: Adam Lindsay Gordon. Oxfordian, immigrant to Australia, politician, livery stable owner. The false prophet often see a softness creeping into the society: we are too effete to eat ketchup like our sturdy sires.
Damn the salsa that comes in a jar. Waiting, as I had to do, for the ketchup to slowly glug from the bottle turned upside down, pounded on, over rapidly cooling fries taught us CHARACTER.
Another feature is a kind of simplicity of message: when in doubt WRITE IN ALL CAPS. THAT WILL GET THOSE PEOPLE’S ATTENTION and having gotten their attention, change will be averted and the situation saved.
Gordon is perhaps least remembered for a poem that begins: “Flash! Bang! Flash! Bang!” and went unheeded as he warned that a decline in fox hunting, already present in his mid-Victorian time would destroy the “race.” (The concept that one need not only be White, horrid enough, but a particular kind of White, Angl0-Saxon or Norman, made a bad even worse.)
A Warning
If once we efface the joys of the chase
From the land, and outroot the Stud
GOOD-BYE TO THE ANGLO-SAXON RACE!
FAREWELL TO THE NORMAN BLOOD!
Take heed: there is fox hunting in Virginia still, but not in Olde England. How is that going?
Theresa May failed to repeal the fox hunting ban, lost her majority, and now is on the ropes. The words of Adam Lindsay Gordon remain unheeded: correlation that is surely causation.
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