In a previous post, History And The Man, I compared President Donald Trump to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in the sense of both men changing the course of history. The difference between them is the degree to which the change of course lasts. Churchill’s change of the course of history will last forever, because Hitler was ultimately defeated, while Trump’s degree of change may only be counted in a few short years, with his presidency only an interregnum. The Greatest Generation that fought and won World War 2 was great because they grew up in a national culture that taught them to be great and expected them to be great. Not so today, where the Left has conquered the institutions, and college students are taught only that the United States is evil, that white privilege is toxic, and that group identity is all. I see little hope that even an eight year Trump interregnum will alter the ultimate course of the country, providing only a brief interlude in the inevitable cascading slide of the United States into the darkness of Venezuelan style socialism and permanent one party rule. Nonetheless, it is always possible that a successful Trump administration will waken the middle class to what is being lost or given away, in which case there is still a chance to save the country for our grandchildren. But if not, then the Left will have won and the darkness will descend on the United States. But nothing lasts forever, not even the dark.

There are no shadows in the dark
What can’t be seen does not exist
An interregnum at its best
The short false dawn could not persist
Demographics rule the tide
Culture changes left from right
The gloried past is now no more
False dawns will not replace the night
But darkness too must see an end
The Left cannot erase us all
The weathered gravestones tell the tale
Of what was lost beyond recall

All empires die. Rome and Carthage are no more, the Pharaohs and the Hittites are no more. But are they really dead? No they are not, for like the outgoing tide, something is always left behind.

Phoenicia surely is no more
But what if they’d not gone before
How would our alphabet be seen
Would royal purple have been green
Was Gibbon wrong, Rome not decline
Collapse instead, would history’s line
Be any different than we know
Our culture, law, the answer’s No
Empires don’t completely die
Faint traces of them always lie
In language, customs, art and gods
In measure metric or in rods
Is Pericles alive today
Does Homer still have much to say
What will we leave when it is we
Who cut the vine and fell the tree
And leave this cold cruel world behind
For leave we shall, but you shall find
That no one ever fully dies
That every day the sun will rise
And what we’ve been and what we’ve done
Will last as long as there is sun

T. S. Eliot wondered if the spider, in a wilderness of mirrors, would suspend operations, and would the weevil delay.

The spider does not cease its toil
Nor weevil doth delay
The daily round of endless work
That won’t admit of play
But weevils have no mirrors and
The spider in the grass
Sees not the world as we do see
When we look in the glass
The mirror sees what we do not
Reflections are not real
We see but dimly in the dark
What only mirrors feel
The spider soon will cease its toil
The weevil slowed at last
The mirror tells of what’s to come
As well as what is past

The success of any country’s foreign policy has always been, and will always be, dependent on that country’s economic and military power being greater, in relative terms, than its rivals. Theorists may disagree, but history does not.

The soldier often does not see the overarching plan
But multiply him by the million score
And add the workers at the forges, each a common man
And multiply them by the millions more
Who work the fields and icy sea and mine the blackened coal
Truck drivers who bring bounty to our door
The women and the children who bring love to mind and soul
And let us know what all of this is for
Then add the men who tap the pools of oil beneath their feet
To run the planes and tanks and guns and ships
Projecting power where blue water runs beneath the fleet
So politicians have the table chips
Without all this the table game is waiting for the scraps
Be handed by the winners to the weak
While theorists write nobly of equality perhaps
And sit in silence for permit to speak

Is time more precious to a Mayfly who lives for a day than it is to a leatherback turtle who lives for two hundred years? Or are all lifetimes equal in length?

Time is not a passing stream
Of man and man’s events
All measured by our inner clock
In order to make sense
Tectonic plates move without cease
And seem to go so slow
We think of them in eons time
Yet how are we to know
For time is an illusion
Time is massless, tied to space
With different tempos, different times
For every different place
And so it is with man’s affairs
We see with childlike eyes
The passing seasons come and go
The stars glide through the skies
And still we think in lifetime terms
Believing all things last
Not knowing that the present
And the future are the past
The plates of time are silent, sure
A tolling of the bell
The length of time the tortoise lives
The Mayfly lives as well

The pendulum’s amazing grace
Is captured in its steady pace
It swings a measured arc in time
Steadfastness at its most sublime
And yet the pendulum disturbed
Can act in many ways perturbed
Once set in motion to correct
A perceived flaw that leads direct
To acts that cause the weight to swing
In greater arcs that soon will bring
A dislocation of the way
In which affairs of man obey
The laws of nature as defined
By mankind from time out of mind
For pendulums don’t ever rest
They do what they always do best
The pendulum is never still
It swings eternal, always will

I don’t know what the future holds in detail, but I know that all futures, and therefore all histories, are determined by the actions of the indispensable man. In the Spring of 1940, as the German panzers raced across France, driving the 300,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force onto the beaches at Dunkirk, one man changed the course of history. Led by Foreign Minister Lord Halifax and Lord Beaverbrook, owner of Britain’s most influential newspapers, the British elites urged Prime Minister Churchill to come to terms with Hitler. Had Churchill done so, the history of the world would have been quite different. We do not know what the terms of surrender would have been, but would very likely have included placing Egypt and the Suez Canal in German hands, giving access to Asia and Axis partner Japan, as well as giving Hitler complete control of the Mediterranean with access to Middle Eastern oil and a southern route into the Soviet Union. The Russian campaign would have been different, with a German victory a likely ending. The French fleet would have fallen into German hands, though the Royal Navy might very well have fled to Canada. There would have been no World War 2 as we know it, and it is fair to ask if Japan, probably the recipient in the peace treaty of British and French possessions in the Pacific, would have felt the necessity of attacking Pearl Harbor. In short, if Churchill had accepted the advice of every influential Englishman, our world would today be completely different. But Churchill did not accept that advice, and rallied the English people to fight, and to prevail.

Today, under completely different conditions than faced Churchill, there has arisen another indispensable man. Donald Trump, a billionaire businessman, has, like Cincinnatus, laid down his plow and saved the nation. The Democratic Party of today is not the Democratic Party of yesteryear, when its ruling Southern elites were more conservative than Eastern Republicans. That Democratic Party was swept away by the pro-communist radical left wing of the party after the presidential election of 1968, becoming more leftist as the years passed, culminating with the election of Barack Obama, the first anti-American president of the United States, leaving, or so he thought, the country in the hands of his successor, Hillary Clinton, to continue the destruction of the American Republic, as well as the destruction of the white middle class and its replacement with third world Mexicans and South Americans who would guarantee a permanent radical socialist governing party that would turn the country into another Cuba or Venezuela. But Trump, like Churchill, now stands athwart history, and the future will record that Donald Trump, singlehandedly, saved the American Republic from destruction at the hands of a radical, America and white people hating Democratic Party.

Thick oily smoke obscured the signs
Directing men with dirt-cracked lips
Through knee high water in long lines
To board the waiting off shore ships
But that was far too many years
And none today recall their names
And few recall blood, sweat and tears
Or London nightly lit by flames
Today on a new Dunkirk beach
America had drifted left
Her gloried past seemed out of reach
As Democrats the country cleft
To warring factions at the throat
Of each the other thought as foe
‘Twas then that Trump took off his coat
And battled leftists toe to toe
The country safe, she took his arm
And with him strode the silent beach
Like Cincinnatus, to his farm
The stars once more within our reach

The king of Lydia was the richest man in the world, yet he lost it all in a quest for power. The tale has been told of how his wise men told him that if he crossed the Halys River into Persia he would destroy a kingdom. Misunderstanding the warning, he crossed the river, and the kingdom he destroyed was his.

What is that which I should turn to
Mighty Croesus asked the sage
Have I gold that men should dream of
Have not books on every page
Blazed my name in crimson letters
Boldly drawn and edged in rime
With such wealth from yon Pactolus
River’d gold bequeathed by time
Gold is gold, the sage did answer
But for greatness more must come
Cross the river, fell a Kingdom
Count thee not the mounting sum
Then upon the gentle Halys
Croesus walked with shoes of gold
Into Persia with his army
Herodotus the story told
Captured by the mighty Cyrus
Croesus begged that he might live
For his life then he would give him
All the gold he had to give
There the story ends as often
Golden stories end not well
Gold is but a shining metal
Worthless if your soul you sell

When I think of my youthful days
And of the very many ways
I diced with danger, laughing at the game
I climbed tall trees and billboards too
I truly did enjoy the view
Up high where eagles soared and called my name
I rode my bike at breakneck speed
And even when I’d start to bleed
From falling down or running into trees
I’d laugh it off and go on home
And douse it with mercurochrome
And put a bandaid on my bloody knees
But what at six seemed fearsome height
In retrospect it almost might
Seem not so far from ground and less than mild
And bike rides where I thought the hills
So steep they caused tremendous spills
Were little tiny bumps and nothing wild
Today when I am gray and old
I find that I am less than bold
And pleased that carefulness is now my style
I think of when I climbed those trees
And rode my bike swift as the breeze
And have to close my eyes and nap a while

Foreign governments complain that the United States is violating international law by leaving the Paris Accords and renewing trade deals and such, but international law is whatever the big guy says it is. Twentieth and twenty-first century institutions of international law were always a means to constrain Colossus, who was constrained only to the extent to which he agreed to be constrained. When Donald trump decided Colossus would no longer be constrained by institutions, laws and agreements inimical to Colossus, Colossus was unconstrained, and no one could do anything about it, any more than Thrace could constrain the Roman senate.

Colossi always strode the sky
Some for good and some for ill
And lasted for the blink of eye
The Hittites, Carthage, dead and still
So too Colossus makes the rules
And does what’ere Colossus deeds
Be not in conflict with the tools
Colossus feels Colossus needs
To keep the peace and maintain law
For that brief time the goddess gives
And when he dies then nature raw
Will rise again and chaos lives