Slouching Towards the Future

This line by W.B. Yeats from his poem, “The Second Coming,” was written in 1919 shortly after the end of World War I. In two short stanzas, the poem paints a pitiless apocalyptic picture of a post-war world. Small wonder the poet was feeling despair, surrounded as he was by chaos and a sea of lost souls. But it wasn’t just the European society of his day he saw collapsing. For Yeats, anarchy was the ultimate fate of all societies. Like many Americans of my generation, I came to Yeats by way of Joan Didion. Didion included Yeats’ poem on the fly page at the beginning of her first nonfiction book, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” This collection of essays put her on the map as one of the key writers of the “New Journalism” school of the 1960s and ‘70s.Didion died in 2021, one of many authentic voices lost during a time when our country saw substantial crumbling to its center.The title essay in her book is about her time in San Francisco in 1967 at the height of the counter-culture movement. “The center was not holding,” is her opening line, and she makes it clear she wasn’t just writing about Haight Street hippies.Didion was chronicling the country’s fraying social fabric; San Francisco just happened to be “where the social hemorrhaging was showing up.”The phrase pops up again as the title of a 2017 film about her life. The documentary “The Center Will Not Hold” was made by her nephew with her cooperation, and can be viewed on Netflix.In the film, she gives a stark assessment of why she turned to writing about politics and hypocrisy in the ’80s. “American politics,” she said, “exists to maintain itself, with no relation to the rest of the country.”True then, even truer today. Looking back, the decade of the ’80s was a golden era compared to today’s polarized political climate. How did we get here?

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