It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness....
Roger Cohen captures the "voice of doom" feel of Dickens' opening for
A Tale of Two Cities in a column for
The New York Times, entitled
The Great Unraveling. Each of Cohen's topic sentences below heads up a fat paragraph detailing the awfulness of our time:
It was a time of beheadings.
It was a time of aggression.
It was a time of breakup.
It was a time of weakness.
It was a time of hatred.
It was a time of fever.
It was a time of disorientation. Nobody connected the dots.
Until it was too late and people could see the Great Unraveling for what it was and what it had wrought.
Cohen doesn't even mention that our economy is flaccid as an old man's dewlap, or that we are "led" in perilous times by what is perhaps the least qualified, least able president of my long life.
