It is IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS time.

Mattis is leaving and he resigned in the most admirable way imaginable. He wrote a polite yet powerful resignation letter that, I believe, will tip the scales of this presidency.

There will be a before Secretary Mattis’ resignation and an after Secretary Mattis’ resignation.

The center will not hold.

Carl Sandburg has been my enduring poet since I was twelve, but now I turn to Yeats.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

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.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

---

Statement from US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Secretary Mattis’ resignation

“It is regrettable that the President must now choose a new Secretary of Defense. But I urge him to select a leader who shares Secretary Mattis’s understanding of these vital principles and his total commitment to America’s servicemembers.”