The Dragons

by Dean Williams

neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.

  Perhaps at some primal species level we had sensed that the constellation of civic, social, and economic forces had reached a tipping point, and would soon have put us irrevocably on the side of the brutes.

  10

  So we, the people, began to resist. We began by getting rid of the cameras. No one knows why we started with them; it could have been because of their sheer ubiquity. And they were such obvious symbols of “The Occupation”, as some of us had begun to call our own governments. The public was gentle but implacable—once the first cameras fell, we didn’t stop until the last one was gone. Initially governments thought it was the work of the usual teen vandals or some new dissident or nihilist group. The cameras were quickly replaced, and just as quickly destroyed or stolen again. The police tried arresting selected individuals whom they had caught red-handed, but in the time it took to process their paperwork, a hundred more cameras were taken out of commission. It became a kind of game: everyone got in on the fun, including white-collar workers and respectable members of the community. In the several months it took for the process to run its course, (meaning, when there were no more cameras to destroy) it was not unusual to see a cluster of polished-looking women in business skirts chatting as they daintily picked up rocks and hurled them at an inoffensive traffic camera. The authorities pleaded for people to stop but we were no longer listening.

  When government representatives asked why people were doing it, they were met with a baffling range of responses, none of which fully explained why millions of law-abiding citizens had suddenly taken it into their heads to demolish the state’s surveillance and security apparatus. “Everyone else is doing it!” “Analog, hell yeah!!” “I just felt like it…” And most ominously, “I never liked those damned things.” The dragons did not come up in these exchanges and interrogations. No one said, “We don’t want to be recorded while we are with the dragons.” Yet that was the inevitable result. In the space of a few months, almost every government in the world had lost its ability to monitor, and thus control, the movements and activities of its citizens.

  This process took longer of course in authoritarian states. People in such countries (and there were only a handful) tended to ignore the cameras, or adopt more passive measures like erecting huge screens in front of the cameras in and around the parks. The leaders’ conundrum was simply the sheer number of ‘criminals’: even the harshest regimes could not arrest all of its citizens. The problem was fated to disappear for the simple reason that eventually there would no longer be anyone on the viewing end of the cameras.

  It was laughably anticlimactic how this tumultuous tapestry of human variety, social interaction and civil disobedience was transformed into a tame, kittenish snooze-fest as soon as we reached the parks and plazas. Removing the cameras had provided a brief bit of excitement, and our days were also fairly hectic while all those new benches were being put in and the land around the dragons was being cleared. But once this was over things really settled down. It was just us and the dragons, which at this stage meant lots of ball games, picnics and concerts in the park, and Dragon’s Eye lazing.

  Yes, I will be the first to admit it: some of us did feel let down. All that feverish socializing, the reclaiming and revitalizing of our streets and neighborhoods, the thrill of successful resistance against the supposedly impregnable security state—it had all been so unexpected, so liberating, so invigorating. Now here we were, shaken and stirred, as it were, and gathered together in public venues all over the globe. Were we really going to sit on our keisters and doze en masse?

  Apparently, yes. For the present, once we had entered the parks and squares, there was a relaxation of monumental proportions as the Dragon’s Eye took its inevitable effect. Cotton-candy clouds scudded silently overhead; the wind whispered to the leaves; birds sang and crickets chirped. And, for the first time in a long time, humanity was quiet, and dreamed.

  11

  No one knows now which humble citizen in which neighborhood in which country first came up with the idea of the dragon song. Initially it might have simply been a natural response to masses of people moving in unison to the parks. Or perhaps some military veteran, more creative than most, looked around as his block straggled haphazardly along like Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow, and decided that a bit more discipline and esprit de corps wouldn't do any harm. And it is a fact that the first dragon songs were basically rip-offs of military “jodies”. Jodies were simple chants that soldiers sang together as they marched or ran. Trainers used them to keep the soldiers in step and generally raise their spirits. Typical jodies extolled the bravery or exploits of the particular unit, or lamented the hardness of a soldier’s life:

  They say that in the army

  The coffee’s might fine.

  It looks like muddy water

  And tastes like turpentine.

  or recounted some humorous story:

  Saw an old lady running down the street,

  Had a chute on her back,

  Jump boots on her feet…

  These first, martially-inspired dragon songs could never be accused of excess originality. Containing a full measure of male braggadocio and a liberal topping of obscenity, they seemed to be more than anything else expressions of neighborhood pride.

  They say that catching dragons

  Is really hard to do

  But they don't know about Boyle St.

  And their dragon-catching crew.

  By now we didn’t really want to catch any dragons. We had grown too addicted to the Eye for us to risk “killing the golden goose” by manhandling or irritating them. But we did somehow feel the need to respond to them in some public, original way. And as the stony ground of a failing modernity began to be replaced with a new, richer soil, such expressions of creativity started to pop up everywhere, like flowers in the spring. The outpouring was multigenerational. For example, the young boys and teens tagging along with the neighborhood teams started to come up with their own lyrical contributions. Their chants relied more on the African-American tradition of “doing the dozens”, a kind of ritual taunting of one’s rival:

  I saw them Flat Creek boys walking down the street,

  Couldn't catch no dragons, no shoes on their feet.

  Or:

  Yo, what time is it?

  Time for Harbor to get the hell out the way

  And let Cumberland go to work!

  The dragons weren’t neglected either:

  Roses are red

  Violets are green

  That’s the weirdest dragon

  I ever done seen!

  Wives and girlfriends, who had mainly been relegated to the back of the pack with the picnic baskets and younger children, began to make their presence felt. A particular type of street performance developed where the women would ritualistically move up to flank the men; then would ensue a series of sung exchanges which often took the form of good-natured ribbing:

  Women: My man said he’d catch that dragon, catch that dragon…

  Men: Woman, you know it’s true.

  Women: But I’m still waiting to pet that dragon, pet that dragon…

  Man: Woman, I’m telling you….

  In America, the original creators of so much that was good, vital and alive in national as well as in world culture, African-Americans, were certainly not going to be outdone by a bunch of suburbanites. After all, the dragons were clustered right in the areas where they often lived, in the heart of the city. So they responded with vigor:

  With a wham! Bam!

  Thank you ma’am!

  We knocked your crew back,
>
  Now why don’t you scram

  Cuz you’re busted, crusted,

  Even your mama’s disgusted

  With all that you’ve done

  To be so distrusted.

  The whole world knows

  Our neighborhood’s fly

  Clean streets, good schools—

  We’re American as apple pie!

  Where you stay it’s lookin’ sci-fi

  Empty lots and hoodlums—

  It’d make Darth Vader cry.

  Our dragon, hell: it wears Versace

  Y’all got a lizard, blotchy and splotchy.

  In our park, we can’t help braggin’,

  One glimpse of your reptile

  People start gaggin’.

  Face it: we’re the revolution

  You’re a pollution

  We’re the solution

  You’re Lilliputian, facing retribution

  And a bloody conclusion.

  Take that!

  12

  Within a year of the dragons’ appearance, weekends and holidays had been transformed into a new mass social phenomenon that was a combination of parade, concert, community meeting and picnic. Every block boasted a dragon-song team; as time went on matching t-shirts and caps became de rigueur. Some wit had the idea of splashing paint on a pillowcase for a make-shift flag, and the dragon banner was born. These grew to be enormous, brocaded affairs, as large as a shop window, gorgeously illustrated with the street or neighborhood name, and sporting a logo, often an animal, chosen to represent some desirable trait such as bravery or fierceness. Typical examples include the “Clairmont