Stories of the Dragon

In a rising country, politicians point your hopes here and there; in a sinking country, they point your resentments.

In a rising country, a president directs your hopes to the moon, a chicken in every pot, a kitchen and home for every such pot of chicken, a college degree for everyone, a better life for your children generation after generation, a world remade in our image….

In a sinking country, a president directs your resentments instead, to immigrants or old money, to mortgage brokers or first-time home buyers, to the rich or to the poor, to the right or to the left, hither and yon, round and round, anywhere but here, in your mirror.

A president offers stories, not policies; a story of how we began, where we are going, who we are, who’s with us, who’s against us, what just happened, what happens next. A policy may change your life for decades, but you prefer a story for the feeling you get while you listen.

I saw a commercial for fat-burning pills on a cable TV channel. Right, I laughed. Did you put too much in your mouth these last few days, or last few years? Then put one thing more in your mouth. Like the joke about chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream: eat all you like, because black food cancels white.

You see a different pill on prime time channels: a purple pill you ask your doctor about, those of you who have doctors to ask, and doctors with time to linger over such questions.

Between pills and between commercials, the stories medicate us too. Law and Order, CSI crime scene investigators, Special Victims Unit….

You would never guess, would you, watching CSI New York or CSI Las Vegas or CSI Miami, that 40% of murders go unsolved in this country? Not counting the murders that are solved wrong. I picture the murderer watching when the wrong verdict comes down, and the wrong person loses his life for the murder. Two victims for the price of one, he chuckles. Buy one, get one free, courtesy of the US Justice System.

A sickening thought, right? If our best efforts only compound the crime we fight? That makes us worse than helpless. Where else does evil come from, except our zealous efforts against evil? Evil is a hydra. Cut off one head and it grows seven more. Worse, the head is your own. You see the severed head and the seven more in your mirror, and see them as your own, if you know what you are looking at, and can bear to look.

Did anyone ever do evil except to fight evil, as he saw it?

But an episode of CSI will medicate that fear and disgust, chase it clean away, and renew you for yet more campaigns against evils large and small, evils near and far.

Let me take my own medicine, then. Russ Douthat has me in his sights when he writes of The Enduring Cult of JFK in the New York Times today:

… why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today….

We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame.

We like to blame Richard Nixon for the 60 thousand Americans who died in Vietnam, and for the death of our idea of ourselves as a country. But in truth it was JFK’s man McNamara, the visionary, the genius, who let thousands more die while he scraped together the courage to confess that the cause was lost. Behind McNamara and Kennedy were the thousands like me, star-struck and adoring. JFK was our knight against the dragon. But our campaign against evil seeded the world with evil, and multiplied evil.

Douthat lets us off easy:

And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.

Then let us chase this dragon all the way home to his lair.

Where does the dragon sleep and wake, before and after his rampages in the world?

In those who hunt him. The dragon lives in those who hunt the dragon.

How is the dragon reborn, again and again?

From our quests to kill him.

How is the dragon rescued, hidden, returned to strength, and launched anew?

In our vows to destroy him; when we vow Never Again. In us. In the mirror; the mirror from which Quixote was running all those years; the mirror over his toilet; the mirror that broke his lance the last time and forever.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, all the faces are your own, and they are cowards, not heroes, fleeing from the one face behind the thousand.

No, endure the small evils and pass them by, or spawn greater evils.

Could this be what the first rabbi meant?

… resist not  evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other also …

Remedies kill.

I lost my daughter to a well-meaning judge who has devoted her life to the fight against domestic violence, and now commits domestic violence of another kind, of another magnitude, on another scale; domestic violence on an industrial scale, if only she knew. May she see the dragon in her mirror before it devours more hundreds of children.

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