Remember this W.B. Yeats poem:
The Second Coming
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 convictions, 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?
What leads me to post this apocolyptic poem? Is it the war in Iraq? The rising concern over illegal immigration? Is it the prospect of a nuclear Iran?
No. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have signed on to make a film version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The hapless pair are fans of Rand's work, which doesn't say much for their taste in literature. Even Randians admit that Rand's novels favor philosophy over story telling. For a take on Rand's philosophy as expressed in Atlas Shrugged, read this classic Whittaker Chambers review of the book. Too bad as Randians Pitt and Jolie are probably atheists, because this is just one more piece of evidence that every day they should get down on their knees and thank God that they are pretty.
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