So Now It Is Christmas
The house is decorated. Certainly to a dispassionate observer the splendor, the glory of light and color is equal to any years past. Yet it is not Christmas time existentially for me. My spirit is more akin to the sharp edge of the air temperature that sinks toward the single digits, and the cold, dead-gray pallor of the sky. Will the Christ child truly come this time around? Will newness, an openness to the future unaccountably arrive on Christmas morning? I do not know. I’m certain that event is entirely outside of anyone’s control.
I felt further depressed by the news cycle on NPR this morning. I 
switched to an Oldies station. I had to. Out of a paroxysm of pique a minority of us elected a impresario of branding to be inaugurated as president. Are not branding techniques coupled with big data analysis the epitome of seduction, misdirection, and conquest? And he’s been busy,– filling cabinet positions with like-minded individuals.
I found a poem relevant to these circumstances, and relevant to my existential state of mind. SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden was written a few hours after the Nazi Wehrmacht launched a murderous offensive against virtually defenseless Poland. The mechanized infantry and armor, and Luftwaffe cut the over matched Polish army to pieces. With negligible cost German armed forces achieved rapid victory.
In the idiom of our day the subjugation of a people would be called, “Such A Great Deal.”
Perhaps I understand what W. H. Auden must have felt in his day. I propose to offer one verse of his poem each day, with little comment of my own.
Verse one.
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
