Thanks for your vigorous response. It's been a while since I probed into Yeats' works, so I am not going to go off-topic too far. I appreciate your acumen. Unlike Yeti’s suggestion, I see no necessity for being combative. My approach is fundamentally congenial with an occasional punctuation. I never participate in flames.

It is interesting to view Yeats alongside GB Shaw. I find it hard to separate out one prominent Edwardian from the whole group, but view the period in the manner of how a Dostoevsky novel is structured.

Sublime incantations seem to me to be right at the center of world affairs now, whether those affairs are immanent/mundane or transcendent. We are seeing religious wars; theoretical science at an impasse now unable to “lift the veil of Isis” (though impressive applied science gains are happening); social models breaking down, producing anxieties expressed in religious fundamentalism or frantic condemnations.

“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.” --- You have a lot more faith in this sassy and superficial crowd than I. The Boom has its share of team players, more than you imply. The people of that era on this very forum have a considerable capacity for teamwork. You like “canny”, but I don’t see much evidence of that quality in the general milieu, if you mean “shrewd and cautious.”

As far as SDS goes, the Vietnam War and the Draft gave them their forum. A professional military and a greater ambivalence about how US interests are defined changes that forum considerably. The SDS analogue personae have more the characteristics of Jean Baudrillard, who said that "deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society."

Persia’s chances for subordinated-empire depend on the backing of Russia and China. The internal demographic conditions in Iran are a spur for power expansion.