EhrhartI woke up this morning thinking of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and his unsettling poem ‘The Second Coming.” Yeats wrote it over 100 years ago, and I’m pretty sure that his title is a reference to the long awaited second coming of Jesus Christ; the poem itself, however, is an utter dismissal of whatever positive implications that concept might suggest. Certainly, Yeats could not possibly have imagined the situation here in the United States of America a century after he wrote his poem, and much of the poem bears little resemblance to what we are experiencing with the Second Coming to the White House of Donald J. Trump. As for “the worst being full of passionate intensity,” here are some claims made by Trump supporters: “He’s real. And so, “the darkness drops again,” and “vexed to nightmare,” we have just had the Second Coming of that “rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born,” ironically on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I don’t think Yeats ever did go to Innisfree and build a cabin there, and few of us have that option either.