It Is Later Than You Think...

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"

Horace's carpe diem. Herrick's "To the Virgins." Service's "It Is Later Than You Think." There is no shortage of poetic reminders that time is fleeting and death is just around the corner.

But for my money Shelley's "Ozymandias" has always been the most evocative. The contrast between Ramesses II's words, inscribed in the pedestal for posterity, and his works themselves, lost forever to the sands of time, has captured my imagination ever since I first read the poem as a schoolboy. It is awesome (in the formal dictionary sense) to think of the wonders of a once-great civilization reduced to nothing but faded inscriptions on relics in the empty desert.

But it was only recently that I read Horace Smith's "Ozymandias." Smith was Shelley's (financier) friend, and in 1817 it was announced that the British Museum had acquired a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II (the Younger Memnon which resides in the British Museum to this day). Hearing of the news, so the story goes, the two set upon a friendly competition to write a poem on the same theme with the same title. Shelley's poem is widely known, but Smith's poem, though less skillful, is even more explicit in identifying the angst we feel when contemplating these old relics.

Also written as a sonnet, but with a more traditional rhyme scheme and structure than Shelley's, Smith's closing sestet is particularly apt:

"We wonder,—and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place."

I imagine we have all daydreamed of an intrepid archaeologist of some future generation uncovering the relics and debris of our own civilization, puzzling over the function of a lifeless iPad or broken TV. Or, more likely, a mysteriously un-degraded McDonald's "hamburger" nestled in its original wrapping. But those thoughts must be particularly acute at this moment of world historical transition.

But our dis-ease does not come from the vertigo we feel when peering over the economic precipice. The punch bowl economy of the never ending stimulus and funny money bubble that has kept the economy afloat for the past eight years is the inevitable consequence of the powers-that-shouldn't-be's decision to not let the housing bubble (and the derivatives bubble that it underwrote) truly pop. Now Japan is circling the drain, Europe is not far behind and the "Everything is Awesome!" train has pulled into a station not seen since 1999 (i.e. the very end of the tech bubble).

Nor does it come from the transformation of the political landscape in recent years, though there is that, too. The seemingly fixed-in-stone nature of America's Republocrat/Democan system has been called into question by profound shifts in public opinion and outright voter revolts on both the left and the right (exactly as I pointed out years ago). This has led us to a Republican party elite uniting against its own presidential nominee and a mass of Democrats who hate their candidate so much they have pledged not to vote for her. Meanwhile in Europe politicians like Merkel who were so recently hailed as the "greatest leader in the world" are now openly despised, and the EU itself is now being openly called into question.

It is not even the socio-cultural turmoil that has led us to the summer of rage and the migrant crisis that disquiets us so. As I've been noting for the past year now, the divide-and-conquer of neighbor vs. neighbor which is being fomented from the top is beginning to tear apart our society. And as the fans are flamed the possibility of civil war in the metaphorical and all-too-literal sense becomes more and more likely.

No, none of these worrying trends by themselves makes us dwell on the end of Pax Americana and the end of this era of civilization. It is the fact that all of these problems converge on one (phony) solution: war.

War, we are told, can solve all our economic problems. Of course, this is a lie based on the worst kind of fallacious broken window thinking, but it is a popular and reassuring one.

War, we are told, is the answer to the political "gridlock" that people have been taught to complain about (without realizing that gridlock is the second best thing that could happen to our would-be ruling class). It will unite the nation around our valiant troops as they go off to conquer foreign lands.

War, we are led to believe, is the only way to resolve our social and cultural differences. The strong will conquer the weak and impose their order upon society in an unwitting mimicry of the way the ruling parasites conquer the rest of humanity and impose their order out of chaos.

And so, as if on cue, the drums of war start beating louder and louder once again. Battle lines begin to form and the world holds its collective breath. People console themselves with the idea that this is just a game, a ruse like the last big standoff. And maybe it is. But the doubt remains.

Of course we know war is not the answer. We know that in that direction only destruction lies. Not just destruction of so many countless scores of innocent lives, but, taken to its logical conclusion, the destruction of our civilization. The end of life as we have known it.

This is the feeling that is evoked by the viewing of Ozymandias' inscription. It does not even rise to the level of pity. It is disgust and anguish at all that could have been, but was so uselessly frittered away. All to slake the egos of bloodthirsty tyrants.

And for us here at the bottom of the power pyramid, all of this looks like it is taking place on some distant stage. Like the shadows on the cave wall that can only be observed and studied, but never changed.

Some cling to the brittle hope that the future archaeologists digging up the charred remains of a Chrysler minivan from under the nuclear rubble of Old New York will, in that moment of wonder, learn the lessons that we should have learned from Ozymandias.

But I? I console myself with a different thought: that of Ozymandias' slaves refusing to serve, all en masse.

Seize the day, my friends, before it seizes you.

This article originally appeared in The Corbett Report subscriber newsletter on August 20, 2016. To sign up for a Corbett Report membership and gain access to the weekly newsletter, please CLICK HERE.