Lance Mannion

"Clearly they could want nothing but a stringent policeman."

It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world--all TABOO with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best of it--or the worst, according to the probabilities.

At such a happy time, so propitious to the interests of religion and morality, Mr Arthur Clennam, newly arrived from Marseilles by way of Dover, and by Dover coach the Blue-eyed Maid, sat in the window of a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. Ten thousand responsible houses surrounded him, frowning as heavily on the streets they composed, as if they were every one inhabited by the ten young men of the Calender's story, who blackened their faces and bemoaned their miseries every night. Fifty thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived so unwholesomely that fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be corrupt on Sunday morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was amazed that they failed to sleep in company with their butcher's meat. Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river. What secular want could the million or so of human beings whose daily labour, six days in the week, lay among these Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of which they had no escape between the cradle and the grave--what secular want could they possibly have upon their seventh day? Clearly they could want nothing but a stringent policeman.

Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They WON'T come, they WON'T come, they WON'T come! At the five minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair.

'Thank Heaven!' said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell stopped.

But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on. 'Heaven forgive me,' said he, 'and those who trained me. How I have hated this day!'

---from Chapter 3 of Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens.

Cohen the Barbarian on the burning of books

"Is there anywhere around here where I can---" Cohen paused lovingly, savoring the words---"where I can get a steak?"

"The star people have closed all the inns.  They say it's wrong to be eating and drinking when---"

"I know, I know," said Cohen.  "I think I'm beginning to get the hang of it.  Don't they approve of anything?"

Lackjaw was lost in thought for a moment.  "Setting fire to things," he said at last.  "They're quite good at that.  Books and stuff.  They have these great big bonfires."

Cohen was shocked.

"Bonfires of books?"

"Yes.  Horrible, isn't it?"

"Right," said Cohen.  He thought it was appalling.  Someone who spent his life living rough under the sky knew the value of a good thick book, which ought to outlast a season of cooking fires if you were careful how you tore the pages out.  Many a life had been saved on a snowy night by a handful of sodden kindling and a really dry book.  If you felt like a smoke and couldn't find a pipe, a book was your man every time.

Cohen realized people wrote things in books.  It had always seemed to him to be a frivolous waste of paper.

---from The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett.

Lincoln's best poem

Every blade of grass is a study;
And to produce two,
Where there was but one,
Is both a profit and a pleasure.
And not grass alone;
But soils, seeds, and seasons --
Hedges, ditches, and fences,
Draining, droughts, and irrigation --
Plowing, hoeing, and harrowing --
Reaping, mowing, and threshing --
Saving crops, pests of crops, diseases of crops,
And what will prevent or cure them --
Implements, utensils, and machines,
Their relative merits, and [how] to improve them --
Hogs, horses, and cattle --
Sheep, goats, and poultry --
Trees, shrubs, fruits, plants, and flowers --
The thousand things of which these are specimens --
Each a world of study within itself.

---A. Lincoln.  From an Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, rearranged as a poem by Fred Kaplan.

How the gods actually operate

It is said that whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.  In fact, whomsoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side.  It's more interesting, and doesn't take so long.

---from Soul Music by Terry Pratchett.

Self-starter

...Lloyd's paltry salary just wasn't going to be enough.  Any damned fool could see that.  He'd had to straighten his shoulders, stand up like a man, and go out and swindle some people.

---from Sandra Nichols Found Dead by George V. Higgins.

"Taking cabs in the middle of the night/driving as if to save your soul..."

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

---"Letter to New York" by Elizabeth Bishop

A warped, frustrated old man

I had the same thought as Nance when I saw Cheney in his wheelchair yesterday, but she beat me to the post.

Ok, Nance has the picture.  I'll give you the quote.

George: Just a minute — just a minute. Now, hold on, Mr. Potter. You're right when you say my father was no business man. I know that. Why he ever started this cheap, penny-ante Building and Loan, I'll never know. But neither you nor anybody else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was...Why, in the twenty-five years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never once thought of himself. Isn't that right, Uncle Billy? He didn't save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me. But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. And what's wrong with that? Why...Here, you're all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You...you said...What'd you say just a minute ago?...They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait! Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken-down that they...Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about...they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you'll ever be!

Potter: I'm not interested in your book. I'm talking about the Building and Loan.

George: I know very well what you're talking about. You're talking about something you can't get your fingers on, and it's galling you. That's what you're talking about, I know...Well, I've said too much. I...You're the Board here. You do what you want with this thing. Just one more thing, though. This town needs this measly one-horse institution if only to have some place where people can come without crawling to Potter.

Death on Sex

Now it really was dawn, the cusp of the day that belonged to no one except the seagulls in Morpork docks, the tide that rolled in up the river, and a warm turnwise wind that added a smell of spring to the complex odor of the city.

Death sat on a bollard, looking out to sea.  He had decided to stop being drunk.  It made his head ache.

He'd tried fishing, dancing, gambling and drink, allegedly four of life's greatest pleasures, and wasn't sure that he saw the point.  Food he was happy with---Death liked a good meal as much as anyone else.  He couldn't think of any other pleasures of the flesh or, rather, he could, but they were, well, fleshy, and he couldn't see how it would be possible to go about them without some major bodily restructuring, which he wasn't going to contemplate.  Besides, humans seemed to leave off doing them as they got older, so presumably they couldn't be that attractive.

Death began to feel that he wouldn't understand people as long as he lived.

---from Mort by Terry Pratchett.

I'm sure we bloggers will have no trouble working out any ironic analogies for ourselves, thank you very much

[Moist] groaned.

He'd made the front page.  He usually did.  It was his athletic mouth.  It ran away with him whenever he saw a notebook.

Er...he'd made page two, as well.  Oh, and the lead editorial.  Bugger, even the political cartoon, too, the one that was never much of a laugh...

His bleary eyes strayed back to the editorial.  They, on the other hand, could be quite funny, since they were based on the assumption that the world would be a much better place if it was run by journalists.

---from Making Money by Terry Pratchett.

A World Gone Mad

"SHUT UP!" screamed Soll.  "Everyone shut up!  SHUT UP!  The next one who doesn't shut up will never work in this town again!  Understand?  Do I make myself CLEAR?  Right."  He coughed, and continued in a more normal voice:  "Very well.  Now, I want it understood that this is a Breath-taking, Block-busting Romantic film about a woman't fight to save the---" he consulted his clipboard and went on valiantly, ---"everything she loves against the background of a World Gone Mad, and I don't want any more trouble from anyone."

A dwarf tentatively raised his hand.

"'Scuse me?"

"Yes?" said Soll.

"Why is it all Mr Dibbler's films are set against the background of a world gone mad?" said the dwarf.

Soll's eyes narrowed.  "Because Mr Dibbler," he growled, "is a very observant man."

---from Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett.

The country we made together

Thus a more inclusive definition of Nixonland:  it is the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans.  The first group, enemies of Richard Nixon, are the spiritual heirs of Stevenson and Galbraith.  They take it as an axiom that if Richard Nixon and the values associated with him triumph, America itself might end.  The second group are the people who wrote those telegrams begging Dwight D. Eisenhower to keep their hero on the 1952 Republican ticket.  They believe, as did Nixon, that if the enemies of Richard Nixon triumph---the Alger Hisses and Helen Gahagen Douglases, the Herblocks and hippies, the George McGoverns and the rest---America might end..  The DNC was right that an amazingly large segment of the population disliked and mistrusted Richard Nixon instinctively.  What they did not acknowledge was that an amazingly large segment of the population also trusted him as their savior.  "Nixonland" is what happnes when these two groups try to occupy a country together.  By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States.  It would define it, in fact, for the next fifty years.

---from Nixonland by Rick Perlstein.

Baseball is like writing, you can never tell with either how it will go...

(Suggested by post-game broadcasts)

Fanaticism?  No.  Writing is exciting

and baseball is like writing.

   You can never tell with either

      how it will go

      or what you will do;

   generating excitement--

   a fever in the victim--

   pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.

Victim in what category?

Owlman watching from the press box?

To whom does it apply?

Who is excited?  Might it be I?

It's a pitcher's battle all the way--a duel--

a catcher's, as, with cruel

   puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly

      back to plate.  (His spring

      de-winged a bat swing.)

   They have that killer instinct;

   yet Elston--whose catching

   arm has hurt them all with the bat--

when questioned, says, unenviously,

   "I'm very satisfied.  We won."

Shorn of the batting crown, says, "We";

robbed by a technicality.

When three players on a side play three positions

and modify conditions,

   the massive run need not be everything.

      "Going, going . . . "  Is

      it?  Roger Maris

   has it, running fast.  You will

   never see a finer catch.  Well . . .

   "Mickey, leaping like the devil"--why

gild it, although deer sounds better--

snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,

one-handing the souvenir-to-be

meant to be caught by you or me.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;

he could handle any missile.

   He is no feather.  "Strike! . . . Strike two!"

      Fouled back.  A blur.

      It's gone.  You would infer

   that the bat had eyes.

   He put the wood to that one.

Praised, Skowron says, "Thanks, Mel.

   I think I helped a little bit."

All business, each, and modesty.

        Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.

In that galaxy of nine, say which

won the pennant?  Each.  It was he.

Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws

by Boyer, finesses in twos--

   like Whitey's three kinds of pitch and pre-

      diagnosis

      with pick-off psychosis.

   Pitching is a large subject.

   Your arm, too true at first, can learn to

   catch your corners--even trouble

Mickey Mantle.  ("Grazed a Yankee!

My baby pitcher, Montejo!"

With some pedagogy,

you'll be tough, premature prodigy.)

They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees.  Trying

indeed!  The secret implying:

   "I can stand here, bat held steady."

      One may suit him;

       none has hit him.

   Imponderables smite him.

   Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds

   require food, rest, respite from ruffians.  (Drat it!

Celebrity costs privacy!)

Cow's milk, "tiger's milk," soy milk, carrot juice,

brewer's yeast (high-potency--

concentrates presage victory

sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez--

deadly in a pinch.  And "Yes,

   it's work; I want you to bear down,

      but enjoy it

      while you're doing it."

   Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,

   if you have a rummage sale,

   don't sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.

Studded with stars in belt and crown,

the Stadium is an adastrium.

O flashing Orion,

your stars are muscled like the lion.

---"Baseball and Writing" by Marianne Moore

Two measures of tenderness

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he'd removed
the iron sliver I thought I'd die from.

I can't remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy's palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife's right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he's given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

---"The Gift" by Li Young Lee

A wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.
I don't see anything objectively.

I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they're wasted-

I never see myself.
Standing on the front steps. Holding my sisters hand.
That's why I can't account
For the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends . . .

In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless.
We're the cripples, the liars:
We're the ones who should be factored out
In the interest of truth.

When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
To the older sister, block her out:
When I living thing is hurt like that
In its deepest workings,
All function is altered.

That's why I'm not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
Is also a wound to the mind.

---"The Untrustworthy Speaker" by Louise Gluck

Every literate male in America is a soliloquist

Tell me about yourself they
say and you begin to
tell them about yourself and
that is just the way I
am is their reply: they play
it all back to you in another
key, their key, and then in mid-
narrative they pay you a
compliment as if to say what a good
listener you are I am
a good listener my stay
here has developed my faculty I will
say that for me I will not
say that every literate male in
America is a soliloquist, a
ventriloquist, a strategic
egotist, an inveterate
campaign-explainer over
and back again on the terrain of him-
self---what I will
say is that they are not un-
interesting: they are simply
unreciprocal and yes it was a
pleasure if not an unmitigated
pleasure and yes I did enjoy our
conversation goodnightthankyou

---"A Word in Edgeways" by Charles Tomlinson

Roaring down the stormtracks of the Milky Way

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground's edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
"Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I'd share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room.
The whole family's asleep
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.
Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street—
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.

---"Halley's Comet" by Stanley Kunitz

 

Hard to quarrel with a plot so moral

At the end a
"The Prisoner of Zenda,"
The King being out of danger,
Stewart Granger
(As Rudolph Rassendyll)
Must swallow a bitter pill
By renouncing his co-star,
Deborah Kerr.

It would be poor behavia
In him and in Princess Flavia
Were they to put their own
Concerns before those of the Throne.
Deborah Kerr must wed
The King instead.

Rassendyll turns to go.
Must it be so?
Why can't they have their cake
And eat it, for heaven's sake?
Please let them have it both ways,
The audience prays.
And yet it is hard to quarrel
With a plot so moral.

One redeeming factor,
However, is that the actor
Who plays the once-dissolute King
(Who has learned through suffering
Not to drink or be mean
To his future Queen),
Far from being a stranger,
Is also Stewart Granger.

----"The Prisoner of Zenda" by Richard Wilbur.

The view was all in lines

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day
I paused and said, "I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther--and we shall see."
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went down. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather--
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled--and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

----"The Woodpile" by Robert Frost.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

---"Questions of Travel" by Elizabeth Bishop.       

I am myself alone, said the crab

It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing, it would say; I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.

---from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

It was snowing and it was going to snow

There's a new complication in
that spraddle of branches just beyond
the pines, not fifty feet from this window
where I'm working a reluctant poem:
a deer, like shadow on snow, then two,
picking their way, nibbling cedar
and scrub ten feet from the clothesline.
Fifteen degrees, windless, a three-day
storm coming and they know it;
even I do, seeing a slate-colored
junco turning indigo, and four
deer now, daring a silence
that grows after the schoolbus
whines on through, a yellow rebuke
to this page where the poem came
close enough to show a face
ruminating a mouthful of juniper.

---Brendan Galvin

Today's Wodehouse

Been far too long since I posted a quote from P.G. Wodehouse.  Here's one of my favorite sentences from one of my favorite stories:  It's Bertie Wooster talking about the "limpet" Lord Pershore, who's been living the high life rather too highly of late:

The only time I met him late at night after that was once when I passed the door of a fairly low down sort of restaurant and had to step aside as he sailed through the air en route for the opposite pavement, with a muscular looking sort of chappie peering out after him with a kind of gloomy satisfaction.

---from "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest."

November

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!

---from "November" by Thomas Hood

The mercy-killing of democracy

Read this last night in A.B. Nuttall's chapter on Julius Caesar in Shakespeare the Thinker:

It is commonly assumed that the further one goes back in time the more severely monarchical will be the prevailing system, as if there were some natural Law of Increasing Democracy.  We have already seen how in the sixteenth century monarchies increasingly freed themselves of ultimate dependence on the consenting will of the people in the great drift towards absolutism (an absolutism that was perhaps anticipated, momentarily and freakishly, by the real Richard II).  This movement reached its climax after Shakespeare's death in the divine right of kings asserted by Charles I.  The string gradually tightened until it snapped; Charles died on the scaffold.  In my lifetime I have watched the governments of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair edge, inch by inch, away from parliamentary democracy towards a less fettered exercise of power.  Sometimes the people themselves seem simply to lose interest; the day may yet come when hardly anyone will want to vote any more.  One of Karl Popper's "paradoxes of democracy" was conveyed by the question, "What is one to do when the demos, the people, freely decides to resign its power to a despot?"  When I first encountered the question I saw it as the bizarre thought-experiment of a closeted theoretician, despite Popper's insistence that such things had really happened.  Then, on a day when I was wandering round the Reichstag in Berlin it dawned on me that there was a day in twentieth-century European history when a society did exactly this.  Truly frightening powers were given to Adolf Hitler by due democratic process.  Democracy can do many things.  It can even commit suicide.

Don't think it's the case that at the moment our democracy is trying to commit suicide.  But I read the polls that show the soaring level of the People's disgust with the war and with President Bush and then read and listen to the pundits absolutely ignoring those polls (with a recent notable exception), and I remember how uninterested they are in the question of whether or not Bush stole the Presidency and how hostile they still are to Patrick Fitzgerald's prosecution of the Plame Affair and how they wish Congress would just ignore all the scandals and not bother anymore with investigating the Bush Leaguers' attempts to co-opt and corrupt the Justice Department; I pick up the paper every morning and read yet another story reducing the Presidential campaign to questions of gossip and fashion and theater criticism; I get an email from one of Newt Gingrich's flacks crowing because David Broder has praised Gingrich for his "big ideas;"  I see the Democratic majority in Congress timidly fumbling to do the wrong thing and the Republicans' refusal today to, as Ken Muldrew put it, "bring US Law up to date with Magna Carta," and I think, No, democracy isn't committing suicide, but there is an elite, based in Washington and corporate offices around the country, who are very much determined to put democracy out of its misery on our behalf and we've got to get their hand off the plug before they pull it.

My current mood, summed up by the same great American poet whose poems I am beginning to wonder why I don't like more

What the bad news was
became apparent too late
for us to do anything good about it.

---from Meaningful Love by John Ashbery