Yeats and others have long seen the next collapse of the West... not the last by any means, nor the first (thank you Edward Gibon for detailing just how bloody, greedy and stupid "Christian" monarchs have been for millennia)... but a real tipping point in the mythic identity of American has occurred. simply put, for good and for ill, there is no more balance of power.
did I want Trump impeached! you betcha! did i think it would happen? nope--never thought it would, for the simple reason that the Republican party has become so erotically mesmerized by his abuse of power that they do not dare wake from their dream. Perhaps Mr Trump was not in fact guilty, perhaps if due process (i.e. witnesses, and an investigation of the same thoroughness as given to Clinton's penis) had been followed we would all have seen that other players - Putin? Pence? Ronald McDonald? were the true culprits.
My sense of the change in American myth is not so much because Trump was not convicted, but that the Senate stated that this would be their conclusion regardless of what evidence was to be presented. Thus: no check, no balance. Will Trump have "learned his lesson?" - yep! that lesson is: he can do whatever he wants without any risk of being stopped, punished or even politically weakened. He is too stupid and too impulsive to do more than moderate damage... damage that will merely bankrupt the country, permanently lose its "world leader" mythic identity, and set the stage for interior state-by-state disasters...
He reminds me very much of Glauco, the man who bought his way into the Roman Senate, who ignored the term of office - flat refused to leave or to seek re-election, he merely kept his senatorial seat because he judged himself the best possible candidate for that office. well, the Roman senators finally got tired of him and pulverized his body with his own senatorial bench. **however** a mere4 40 years later another fellow by the name (as it were) of Cesar Augustus showed up, pointed to Glauco as precedent, and shut down the Senate completely, thus ending the Roman Republic and beginning the reign of the Cesars--who, in spite of filmic presentation--were not good people!...
I have used the word "myth" here a few times - society, politics, marriages, and even sports are profoundly impacted by myth. When i was young, there was no superbowl; winning the conference was the be-all of the football season; now that passes by with only a local celebration because we *believe* that the superbowl is a super deal... people believe in the myth of marriage--that having become married that very fact will empower and protect them from infedelities and other woes... one reason people don't like to get divorced is that divorce not only ends our faith in another person, but shatters our ability to believe that marriage has any power or promise in it... Was America the world leader? well, kind of, but only a historian 500 years from now will be perhaps sufficiently unbiased to asses America against Russia, China, India, Indonesian and so forth... but once the *myth* of gravitas is broken, once we hear the queen fart, it's all over... she's just a smelly old lady with nothing special to add to the situation... welp, we Americans are now the proud owners of one juicy wet fart so far as the world is concerned so... here is Yeats on this very subject (America, not farts):
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.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
