Episode 071: What Rough Beast Slouches Towards Metropolis?

Easter! A time for rebirth, renewal, and awakening. Spring has sprung and chocolate-y eggs dot the newly green grass. That which once was dormant and seemingly gone from the Earth wakes anew and blossoms! But what if it wakes up… different this time?

Poetry gets a bad rep as a thing for sissies and flopsy sleeved dandies. But there’s much to learn from it. In the often quoted Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” he writes:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It is a sexy passage: the rise of something hideous and monstrous, now arriving. He’s talking about the rise of the Anti-Good, the time when everything that held together instead now falls apart. Same poem has in it a less quoted part, which is maybe more fitting to the topic at hand in today’s podcast:

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.

See? In four short lines, William Butler Yeats has summed up what we take two hours to do: Describe how fucking horrible BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN was, and why it is a crime and a travesty. Poetry has value. Yeats called it in 1916, a full 100 years before this cinematic abortion was splatted onto the screens and consciousnesses of the American people.

ALSO this episode: Easter! The inconsistent nature of the Easter Bunny mythos and Keith’s… peculiar take on it. Josh’s mother in law’s unpredictable but always perfect responses. And, while we’re at it, mannequins.

But the real meat here is the death of the ideas and ideals of heroism. The mannequins? That’s just our draw.

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