‘Things Fall Apart’ With No End in Sight

Portland police officers chase demonstrators after a riot was declared in Portland, Ore., on April 12, 2021. Nathan Howard/Getty Images

Commentary

Joe Biden, the phantom president, gave a speech recently that the world immediately little noted nor long remembered.

For the doddering, barely ambulatory, linguistically challenged Biden, his first address to Congress was intended as a substitute State of the Union speech, but like everything else he does, it fell as flat as he nearly did when scrambling up the steps of Air Force One back in March.

So let me help our poor president out: The state of the union is terrible, and getting worse. Examples abound:

• Russian hackers apparently just took out one of the most important pipelines on the East Coast, and it’s taken the administration more than a day to respond to this direct assault on our national security. But what’s the rush? The anti-American “progressive” left hates the oil industry anyway and is busy plotting an oil-and-carbon-free future for Grass Hut America, so overall, it’s a net plus!

• The American birthrate has now fallen for six years in a row, to a record-low 1.64 babies per woman. Some blame this on the dreaded COVID-19, but it would make more sense for births to rise, given that couples have had more than a year of snuggle time while riding out the “pandemic” and collecting government checks.

A more likely reason is the non-stop barrage of propaganda from the anti-human left, whose refrain has long been “how can you bring a child into this world?”—a world, by the way, they’ve been doing their best to ruin for more than half a century with abortion, divorce, and latterly, child sex-change operations.

• Speaking of COVID-19—caused by the CCP virus, which most independent authorities now agree could have been hatched in a lab in Wuhan—the practically state-run media is now openly fretting that vaccination rates are leveling off as Americans begin to ask themselves whether they want to voluntarily take part in the biggest real-time laboratory experiment in history.

And now, the FDA has authorized the Pfizer vaccine for use on children aged 12 to 15—a group that is essentially immune to COVID-19 anyway. Meanwhile, Washington—in collaboration, National-Socialist-style, with its media, tech, and corporate lackeys—will soon turn to vaccine passports, brothers under the skin with the old Soviet system of internal passports.

“The Food and Drug Administration on Monday authorized use of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds in the United States, a crucial step in the nation’s steady recovery from the pandemic and a boon to tens of millions of American families eager for a return to normalcy,” cheered The New York Times, the American equivalent of the USSR’s mouthpiece/newspaper Pravda.

• Around the country, especially in Democratic-dominated states, “homeless” encampments have sprouted like kudzu. The famed Venice Beach in Los Angeles now resembles the anarchic opening “Dawn of Man” scene from Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with vagrants, derelicts, and hobos viciously attacking and beating residents and each other.

Meanwhile, across town in Angelino Heights, work crews just removed more than 35 tons of human biological and hazardous waste from Echo Park Lake and its surrounding park, which is similarly bristling with brand-new tents and, no doubt, cell phones.

• Meanwhile, “anti-racism” mania has now turned its sights on technology and discovered “techno-racism”—an unwitting and unintended discrimination against “people of color” that is, according to CNN, “baked into some of the technology we encounter every day.” The reference is to the difficulty some facial-recognition systems encounter in distinguishing between and among black faces.

“Even when tech developers and users do not intend for tech to discriminate, it often does so anyway," says one critic. “Technology is not neutral or objective.”

• On the foreign-policy front, Russia is about to gobble up whichever bits of Ukraine it still desires; the communist Chinese just had a chunk of space debris crash-land in the Indian Ocean; and the manifestly unqualified Vice President Kamala Harris has thus far managed to foul up the one job she has: addressing the entirely Biden-made crisis at the U.S.–Mexico border.

Coming Apart

In short, things are coming apart, and there’s no help in sight.

In 1920, just after World War I had come to an end, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats published what is likely his most famous poem, “The Second Coming.” To a shell-shocked populace stunned by four years of brutal slaughter, the world had indeed spun out of control:

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.

That could well describe our world today. The worst—the international, cultural-Marxist left—are indeed full of passionate intensity: an intensity fixated on destroying the old order “by any means necessary,” as their favorite saying goes.

In the half-century I’ve been interacting with them, they have pulled down the pillars of the American nation-state, wielding our own laws, customs, and Constitution against us.

“Mere anarchy,” indeed.

But anarchy is what they’re after, and always have been. One by one, they’ve eroded or even abolished constitutional protections such as freedom of speech, religion, and assembly found in the First Amendment.

They’re publicly gunning for the Second Amendment now and, over the course of the post-FDR period, have rendered the Ninth and 10th amendments (which were intended to establish expressed powers/limited government) as nullities.

Now, in a capital still ringed by barbed wire, a confused old man sits at a desk signing “executive orders” designed to overturn any vestiges of his predecessor—whose aim, you may recall, was to “Make America Great Again.” The economy boomed, the nation became energy self-sufficient, race relations had at least stabilized, the Middle East was moving toward stasis, and both the Russians and the Chinese were under no illusions about our international intentions.

And then came the election and huge blunder of Jan. 6, and it all vanished. Well, as they say, elections have consequences.

“Surely, the Second Coming is at hand,” writes Yeats in the second stanza of his great poem. But be careful what you wish for: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

If you thought Biden’s first 100 days were bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.