Oh, spare me. The day you attempt to smudge my skirt, you had better check to make sure you still have all your fingers.

Yeats's poem, composed in 1919 and published in 1921, was an expression of his own complex mysticism, a belief system that he himself constructed involving two gyres nested top to bottom one inside the other, representing conflicting trends in civilization as expressed in history. He grouped science with democracy and mysticism with primative power (the sphinx).

The collapse of which Yeats spoke referred to the conflict between modern and ancient, more precisely expressed by critic Harold Bloom in his division of Western intellectual history into cyclic stages he identifies as Theocratic, Aristocratic, Democratic, and Anarchic (our present stage before reentering the Theocratic age). Yeats was obviously influenced by the First World War and its hideous effect on European society. He was not talking about economics in any sense at all. He was talking about destruction, though, and with a certain amount of cold glee.

If you are viewing Obama through the glass (darkly) of your experiences of the SDS, you have mistaken where in the historical cycle, American version, we are. A new generation is on the rise. They are more a group of team players than we of the loud and bossy Boom. They appreciate canny analysts like Obama, and can take the pieces he places in play and make a whole of them themselves.

Re: west Asia: I defer to your crystal ball. The Persians may yet surprise us all, however. They are an ancient, intelligent and canny people.