The Dragons
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something—in there with us now.
Unfortunately for Smokey and his business model, the phenomenon of Flavor began to disappear around this time. It seemed that the dragons now wanted to speak to us with one voice.
The third development concerned daily rituals such as greetings and farewells. Even relatively ‘loose’ cultures such as the North American began to acquire an aura of formality, of ceremoniousness. Jocular phrases like “Yo!” or “Whazzup?” were now frowned upon. Instead, we started to use longer, more ornate structures such as “I’m with you”, accompanied by a hand gently placed on the person’s shoulder. Friends meeting each other in the city might part with a heartfelt “See you in the Eye!” or “Stay in the Eye!” Not only were we not embarrassed by this renewed observance of etiquette, we depended on it. We were spending far more time in close quarters now, marching to the parks and congregating there for the Eye. Not resorting to the artificial safety valves of ‘going online’ or withdrawing into television-land was making us stronger, but it did require a heightened sense of community and decorum. We were evolving.
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We now had a new purpose and an altered perspective on many things in life. When you love someone (and how we did adore them now, those plump little beasts!) there’s nothing you won’t sacrifice for them—nothing. Money, time, comfort: it will all be cheerfully relinquished at the drop of a hat if it is for the benefit of your loved ones.
And so the things which had loomed so large in our minds before—getting that promotion, having the latest gadget, knowing the name of a pop star in a country halfway around the globe—suddenly seemed to dwindle in significance. Like anything thrown in a fire, their true nature had been ineluctably revealed. And that fire was our newfound love for the dragons, which had appeared like angels in our hour of need to redeem our polluted souls.
Hadn’t they been the ones to bring us out of our self-imposed materialistic death-spiral and technological isolation? Wasn’t it they who, simply by giving us an initial reason to come out into the public again and unite, had set in motion the entire chain of events that now had presidents, CEOs, media czars, and all the other false prophets of our deluded age trembling with fear? For they were now, as they saw their power and influence wane daily. Shock, rage, disbelief and panic fought for space in their fevered, venal minds. “Who the hell do these peasants think they are? This can’t be happening!” But it was. Pick a metric: factory out put, consumer demand, voting rate, home loan applications, military sign-ups, movie tickets bought…every single measure of the global population’s participation in the officially approved fun fair showed a precipitous decline. We weren’t buying it anymore.
And it had been the phlegmatic dragons, whom no one had ever seen do anything other than yawn, doze, and flap lumberingly off into the dusk, to deliver undeserving humanity from the clutches of these people and the forces of dehumanization they represented.
Now, what would you do for someone you felt had saved you? Who had given you back your humanity? Or rather, what wouldn’t you do? Wouldn’t you do everything in your power for them? And would you tolerate anyone trying to restrict your access to your loved ones? Or, Eye forbid, harm them in any way? No, you wouldn’t. And neither did we.
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When the end came, it came quickly, over the course of about a month. Four weeks to shake off the shackles of Mammon and Mars. Four weeks to transform the face of the globe, to turn everything upside down; to destroy the old, in order to create the new. This was the revolution. The people’s revolution, long-prophesied, long-awaited! Why had it come? And why did this one succeed, when so many popular revolutions had failed before?
It came because the bright promise of democracy had been tarnished and then destroyed by men and women who had proven themselves to be inherently incapable of safeguarding the public’s trust. It came because capitalism’s promises had turned out to be lies that had only led us into a sterile, self-destructive dead end. It came because the unbridled greed and arrogance of the wealthy and powerful had blinded them to the simple fact that only they, a vanishingly small minority of the population, wished for things to stay as they were. It came because, despite the undoubted courage and dedication of many fine journalists, the media as a system had simply failed to do its job: objectively report the news and protect the weak and innocent. It came because we had finally realized that a way of life predicated on extracting every last morsel of the Earth’s exploitable resources could no longer be sustained. It came because the undeniable improvements in the material living conditions of those lucky enough to live in developed countries had not been matched by any commensurate progress in our emotional or spiritual welfare.
And it came because at long last the people had allies who could help us fight the concerted power of the authorities, the oligarchs, and the generals. Those allies were the dragons, sleeping in the trees. It is paradoxical but nonetheless true. Given the raw power, cunning, and ruthlessness of the forces arrayed against reform, forces which had only grown stronger with the advances in communications technology, weaponry, and organizational sophistication, we wouldn’t have stood a chance if we hadn’t had some additional help, something to change the equation. Whether we were actually hypnotized, as some still assert, or merely emboldened by the thousand-fold increase in communal spirit that singing, marching, and gathering in the parks had engendered, one thing is clear: the dragons had tipped the scales.
So we stopped the motor of the world. Production lines slowed, then came to a standstill, because the workers were no longer showing up. Classrooms and offices fell silent, and airports, stadiums, and shopping malls became hushed and still. Trains and buses ran on reduced schedules, then stopped altogether. Cars were parked and abandoned by the side of the roads with the keys still in the ignition. As for the Internet, e-commerce and the ‘knowledge economy’, suddenly the curtain in the corner was drawn back, exposing billions of bored people staring at a glowing screen. When they went away, so did the Web. Television and cable continued to broadcast for a few weeks longer, but at some point there weren’t enough talking heads or technicians to keep the systems running. Screens turned to static, then went dark.
And it was only then that the regimes of the world, ‘democratic’ or otherwise, along with their military and business cronies, finally realized the threat that the dragons posed to them, to their entire Potemkin village of avarice and naked power. Perhaps if the world leaders had acted more quickly and in concert, it all would have turned out differently. Perhaps it would have been a close thing, with hard-fought battles. They still had nominal control of all the organs of power and control, including the media, military, legal and legislative systems. But they no longer had the manpower. When they finally picked up the phone to give the order to move on the parks and public areas, it was too late. There just weren’t enough men with guns on the other end of the line.
But they did make a desperate, last-ditch effort to regain control. Afterwards we wondered at their bravery. We found it almost admirable. There were so few of them, and so many of us. It’s true that they had weapons, but we had something even stronger—belief. Those among them whom we could convince to give up their weapons escaped with their lives. Those we couldn’t, did not. The ‘leaders’ themselves did what soft, weak things always do under pressure: melt away and disappear.
We didn’t need politicians anymore, or business moguls, or talking heads. We had no reason to watch ‘the news’ at all. What was it but a lie, a bit of cheap tinsel thrown in our faces to distract us from the truth? We didn’t need to seek refuge in addictions, or competition, or mindless entertainment, or materialism. We didn’t need to go on vacations, or paint our house, or drive around in a new, fancy car. There was nowhere we had to go, nothing we wanted to buy. Everything we needed was waiting for us in a neighborhood park or local square. The motors of the world had indeed been stopped, but not by any creative capitalistic elite. We, the people, had accomplished it all. In
conceivable? A wise Roman, Pliny the Elder, once wrote, “How many things are considered impossible until they are actually done?” And we had done it. We had killed the fungus.
Nationalism, too, proved to be an idea whose time had come and gone. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the dragons had appeared a hundred or even fifty years earlier, before the rise of hyper-capitalism. As it was, the once-strong ties that bound citizens to the motherland had been so weakened by the corrosive acid of the relentless commodification of every aspect of human existence, by the marketing, by the outsourcing and downsizing, that they simply snapped under the strain of events. The political class grasped too late the Faustian nature of the bargain they had struck with the industrialists and their minions. Every backroom deal, every loosening of a regulation or loophole cleverly inserted into a law, inevitably undermined the state, and thus the rationale for the politicians’ very existence. After all, who needs governors, senators, prime ministers or presidents when the CEOs, lobbyists and bankers are the ones calling the shots? In their hour of need, our