In the William Kristol editorial criticizing the participants of Thursday night's GOP debate, he played off a reference to a famous poem to reiterate his hope that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie would enter the race:
A third e-mailer Thursday evening, watching the debate, was reminded of Yeats’s “The Second Coming:”
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
There’s some truth to that. But I can’t help wondering if, in the same poem, Yeats didn’t suggest the remedy:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Sounds like Chris Christie.
To quote Kristol from elsewhere in his editorial: "Yikes."
Yeats was writing in a post-WWI environment and likely referencing the recent Russian Revolution. The "rough beast" was NOT a savior nor the second coming of Christ, but rather a horrifying false prophet that would come, take Christianity's place, and destroy the world through chaos. It was meant to invoke gloom and a sublime transcendental horror, not a hope for salvation of the world (or a political party). I sincerely doubt that was the allusion Kristol meant to make.
I wonder how much Kristol's parents paid for him to attend The Collegiate School? And Harvard. Yet he gets the basic meaning and context of one of English's most famous poems wrong and has overtly compared his favored candidate to the Antichrist! Good grief.
To riff off a famous poem by another modernist, T.S. Eliot: I do not think Chris Christie will sing to you, Mr Kristol, and the Republican candidates' voices will wake you from your fantasy, and you'll drown.
And if Chris Christie doesn't come to Kristol's rescue and run for "Emperor of Ice-Cream", I think it'll be more Eliot's "The Waste Land" than Keats' "The Second Coming" in any case...
Update: I want to point out that though I recognized Kristol's literary error on my own when I read his editorial as linked by Hunter on the front page, I just did a Google search for "Kristol Christie Antichrist" and apparently James Poniewozik got to the point first...