When all will be revealed?

Did you enjoy spring in our North Country? It's almost gone you know. Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer, is two weeks from Monday. Meteorological summer begins on June 1. We've yet to enjoy a week of sunny days with temperatures around 70℉. To paraphrase one of the great lines in the movie Casablanca, "We'll always have October."

Today was the Governor's Fishing Opener up in Otter Tail County. It's too early for tv news reports, the Star Tribune site is screwed up at the moment, and the PiPress site has no real results to report. On the "bright side," the Department of Homeland Security yesterday issued a new national terrorism alert, claiming the "Country Faces 'Significantly Evolved Threats.'" Meanwhile, closer to home, the Republican-controlled Minnesota state senate continues to refuse to participate in negotiations that could result in a legislatively approved budget for the next two years. So now we'll fund yet another special session because our elected representatives refuse to do their work, let alone finish on time.

These days we are reminded, again and again, of a Winston Churchill observation:

He said it (House of Commons, 11 November 1947)—but he was quoting an unknown predecessor. From Churchill by Himself, 574:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

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?

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