A Second Coming: the Terrorists and the President


It was only the third speech President Barack Obama had delivered from the Oval Office, and it was apparently meant as a signal to the nation on Dec. 6 as to just how serious he was about dealing with international terrorism and the Islamic State—especially in the wake of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which left 14 dead.

The Dec. 2 murders—perpetrated by the married Muslim couple, Syed Rizwan Farook, an American-born citizen and his wife Tashfeen Malik, who were both killed in a shootout—has been officially designated an act of terrorism by the FBI.  A horde of weaponry was found at the home of the killers, who had used two .223 caliber semi-automatic rifles in their killing spree at the work place of Farook.  It  was also discovered that Tashfeen Malik had apparently posted a Facebook pledge to the Islamic State.

Republican presidential candidates, especially Senator Ted Cruz, almost immediately blasted the president’s policies in dealing with the threat of ISIL.

Most of the candidates vied with each other in chin-and-chest-out bellicosity, while Cruz, in his by now customary flannel shirt, said at an Iowa gun range Friday at which he announced the formation of a Second Amendment Coalition, “You don’t stop bad guys by taking away our guns, you stop bad guys by using our guns.” New Jersey governor Chris Christy said, “What we’re facing is the next world war. This is what we’re in right now, already.”  Cruz said, “Whether the administration  realizes it, or is it willing to acknowledge it, our enemies are at war with us.”

The president apparently realized it saying that the shootings were an “act of terrorism”  and that “the threat from terrorism is real and we will overcome it. . . . We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us.”

Yet Obama announced no serious new military initiatives, but rather wants to continue on a coalition of nations, a U.S. special operations presence in the region, including Iraq and finding ways to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists. Such methods include banning weapons sales to people on flight watch lists, which would seem to be a no-brainer, but for which legislation was only this last week roundly opposed by all but one Republican in the Senate.

While acknowledging that terrorism—especially in the wake of San Bernardino and the terrorist attacks in Paris—posed a growing, serious threat and present danger to the United States—the president seemed equally committed to preventing divisions  in the United States which would lay the blame on Islam as a whole. The danger isn’t far-fetched: we’ve heard calls to arms, and the internet is on fire with reckless, hateful posts.

Add to that, the fact that guns—their use not only by criminals and terrorists as well as by law enforcement—are so central to this debate, one way or another. Their over use, say to speak, gives an increasingly feverish and fearful tone not only to the way people talk about things and debate but to the intensity of the talk and the tone.

To many people around the world, things feel out of kilter, as if a plague has been set loose, amorphous but loud.

In politics, it seems a time of fearful faction, where politicians running for president can ignore facts, caution, rationality and not be punished by the public. We’ve had the know-nothing party, now we have the rise, out there in the digital world,  of  the know everything-understand-nothing party.

We seem to be living in a worrisome, twisted story of the worst sort, in which no one knows what will happen next,  but everyone knows something, somewhere, is going to happen, some new outrage that will race through the body politic like wildfire.

In times like these, the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming,” and some of its lines echo like music as a shrill warning: “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 us loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

Yates wrote that poem in 1919, one year after the end of World War I.

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