Geodog

Karl Rove's nightmare

I read this poem again tonight for the first time in years, and thought it particularly apt for our current political situation:

...
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?

(How serious people's faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home so lost in thought?


Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.

And some who have just returned from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.


And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?

They were, those people, a kind of solution.

from Waiting for the Barbarians

By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933),
translated by Edmund Keeley

See also the Guardian article by the same title: "A once-great empire, Rome fell into catastrophic cultural and economic decline. Morris Berman on chilling parallels with modern America."