by Tom Shafer
December 18, 2021
So, on the thirteenth of December, I slipped into the hot tub hoping to enjoy one of our best meteor showers, the Geminids. Because the moon was waxing gibbous (and toward full), I was not expecting to see the 150 per hour or so that I might if the moon were new, but I still anticipated a sixty or so per hour average. Last year’s shower coincided with a new moon, so the peak night was absolutely spectacular – and actually, so were the nights leading up to it.
The Geminids are one of our younger showers, having first been witnessed (from a Mississippi River riverboat) in the mid-1830s. And technically, we should be referring to it as an “asteroid” shower because we know now that the particles that pepper our atmosphere yearly belong to an asteroid named 3200 Phaethon. The long white streaks appear to originate near the Gemini constellation (thus the name), which sits prominently about fifteen degrees south of being directly overhead on the thirteenth (from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.) – making it quite comfortable to watch from the spa.
I saw two within the first minute of being in the water, so I knew it was going to be a good show. Over the next twenty minutes, I tracked eleven more (though no fireballs!), but being slightly exhausted, I closed my eyes to unwind in preparation for my night’s sleep. Unfortunately, my mind wandered back to news from early evening, when the house committee investigating the January 6th (2021) insurrection at the Capitol voted to recommend that Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows be found in contempt of Congress. Not unexpectedly, the full House would follow suit the next evening – mostly along party lines. Predictably, the news cycle had moved on from the deadly tornados that ravaged the middle of the country over the weekend.
Lately, I’ve been thinking much about our country. The questioning of given truths. The war against science. Threats to education. Polarization – with people deeply entrenched in their individual silos. Democracy being challenged on so many fronts, from voting rights to Roe v. Wade. Our inability to navigate and mitigate a deadly pandemic – even with vaccines and other life-protecting convalescents. My thoughts wandered to a query I’d been pondering for several years now:
Am I witnessing American decay?
The simple answer is yes.
When I was still teaching American literature, at appropriate times, I would point out to my students that the history of man is the history of fallen power, that every empire, dynasty, kingdom, or superpower eventually falls – some in spectacular fashion. Of course, I always posited that the same would happen to us. As a younger educator, I frequently played contrarian, the devil’s advocate, and didn’t necessarily believe a statement like that, instead hoping to spur intellectual curiosity and thoughtful dialogue. But as I grew older and observed a changing country and world, I began to believe the truth of American decay.
Today, as I unfortunately watch the erosion of America, and all that it stands for, I can’t help but think about poet Robinson Jeffers, and particularly his poem “Shine, Perishing Republic,” one he penned in 1925. I sometimes introduced Jeffers and his poetry to my students, delicately because his straightforward style always took direct aim at sufferable man, impolitic politics, and an uncaring God. But I appreciated his traditional blank verse (not unlike Walt Whitman’s) and his love of nature and animals – though mostly at the expense of man himself. And I was especially fascinated that in 1925, as our country was approaching its 150th birthday and after our success in helping bring an end to the First World War (then titled “the war to end all wars” from the 1914 H. G. Wells book The War That Will End War), he was espousing and predicting demise and ruin of our republic. Here is his poem “Shine, Perishing Republic.”
- While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire
- And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
- I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
- Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
- You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
- A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
- But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
- Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.
- And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.
- There is the trap that catches noblest spirits that caught – they say – God, when he walked on earth.
Okay, so some of you may not be big fans of poetry (like many of my students), but hopefully you can appreciate his ability to string words into pithy phrases: America “heavily thickening to empire and protest”; “life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly a mortal splendor”; or “man, a clever servant, insufferable master . . . that caught – they say – God, when he walked on earth.”
Though the images and language here can be construed as pretty negative, Jeffers does point us toward our salvation, in that “life is good,” that nature (from flower to fruit back to earth) teaches us (and America) about our mortality, that we are always “left the mountains.” In spite of our volcanic “vulgarity,” our “decadence,” and our “corruption,” man (and America), the “insufferable master,” needs only to listen to her mother (Earth) and what she is endeavoring to tell us.
I have to admit that I have always been a bit of a closet pessimist – which might surprise many of my former students and current friends. All of us are performance artists in one way or another, and I tend to reveal a hopeful, more optimistic aspect – though touched with a healthy amount of sarcasm. I suppose I could blame my connection to a never-ending news cycle or my fondness for problematical, psychological, existential novels (and novelists like Camus, Dostoevsky, Wharton, Sartre, and McDonagh), but I have carried pessimism for a very long time, stretching back to my youth. Of course, I never allowed it to consume or define me, probably because I am left brain dominant, which colors me more logical and academically inclined – and more disposed toward optimism according to many brain studies completed in the 1990s. I guess I have always tried to see the world for what it is, and not for what it can be – and I have continually attempted to retain a worldview first, not an American view. Perhaps that worldview pushes my needle toward pessimism.
So, even if America is a “perishing republic” making “haste on decay,” I’m really okay with that. Perhaps we will be propelled to embrace evolution toward a more robust, progressive view of what humans (and countries) should and can be, the universists that I have written about in the past (see “I’m a Universist – and You Should Too!” under my For Your Consideration tab). Some may insist that Star Trek was just a campy ’60s television show, but Captain Kirk got it right when he narrated before each show that we were meant “to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” That’s the way all of us should be thinking, and where all of us should be headed.
