Short Essays – Page 14 – RHETORICAL CRITIC

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, all of the hardcore inner-circle followers of Voldemort, the so-called Death Eaters, have a permanent brand on their left forearm, the Dark Mark. It serves as a perverse badge of honor and a way for Voldy to summon them to him quickly, or vice versa.

All the DE are second-rate henchmen at best, of course; Harry and a bunch of kids defeat their entire lineup in book five, and they only start racking up kills at the end when Voldy was right there with them at the height of his power. Not much more than vanilla stormtroopers talking trash while Vader does the carving. Ron’s mom took out Lestrange by herself, and without Voldy as a foci for their pettiness, they collapsed. Survivors got a date with the Dementors; the Malfoys turned, as the most inept and cowardly of the bunch, and were pardoned.

But the Marks remained, even just as a scar that no longer burned.

I imagine it made for some awkward conversations in public, assuming they ventured out at all after the war. Did Draco Malfoy simply deny if asked that he was once a Death Eater? Maybe he just stuck to long-sleeved shirts? Perhaps he simply hung out with his former toadies and moaned about the good old days. Or he turned a new leaf and stopped being an ass. But even without permanent physical proof of his sworn loyalty to the Dark Lord, I’d think it would be the first thing on anyone’s mind when interacting with him. A lifetime of benign philanthropy would help, of course, but he’d always be the ineffectual bully who agreed to kill Dumbledore, even if he ultimately refused and his family cruelly manipulated him.

The election is what made me think of this.

Imagine if after Harry zapped the freshly Horcrux-bereft Dark Lord with the Elder Wand, Voldy managed to file multiple lawsuits claiming the Elder Wand was stolen and rightfully his, making his death technically impossible and leaving his existence in magical limbo, even though Draco Malfoy’s ineptitude, Neville’s prophecy, and a half-ton of heroics made it very possible.

The wizarding world then pauses indefinitely to allow the suits to play out; the now incorporeal Voldy summons all of his remaining Death Eaters via their Marks, who insist they really won the war despite being powerless, and the word spreads. The Daily Prophet attempts to point out the truth, but with its reputation in tatters after being taken over by the Death Eater-run Ministry of Magic during the war, few minds are changed. Fake news. Harry is flummoxed; rather than return to the status quo, he retains the Elder Wand just in case, maintaining a permanent epistemic cold war where Hogwarts both won the Second Wizarding War and lost it, depending on who’s talking.

In a weird way, a version of this scenario essentially what starts the Potterverse – Voldy being killed by his own spell, but refusing to die and plotting to return with the help of his inane followers.

This is all of course nonsense, even by the standards of a work of fantasy. Trump lost the election and the election wasn’t rigged in every battleground state in a massive conspiracy that necessarily would need the active, enthusiastic, and sworn-silent cooperation of hundreds of Republican officials, and any solid evidence otherwise would make any investigative reporter’s career.

And yet it is quite popular to believe otherwise because there is an emotional truth that supports that belief, and that emotional truth rests secure and invincible within a narrative shared between Trump and his supporters.

It is not as simple as a discreet Q pin or a MAGA hat or even the standard dog whistle phrasing and GOP talking points.

It’s a fantasy theme.

Fantasy themes are an old idea in rhetorical theory, related closely to narrative and social movement criticism.

The concept works thusly.

All humans don’t like bad news. Rather than deal with it directly and honestly, we tend to rationalize it. And when we rationalize bad news, we create a new mental narrative, a fantasy theme, that allows the rationalization to keep going.

The longer the rationalization keeps going, the stronger it gets and the more bad (and good) news it sweeps into its growing storyline. Confirmation bias is a closely related concept, as any incoming data is explained as part of the fantasy theme in a way that does not threaten the theme itself.

I am familiar with how this works not because I have some deep insight into Trump supporters. I am familiar with how this works because I have a deeply anxious personality that I am not always successful at working around; I thus alternate between deep dives into fantasy-theme thinking and cold rationality. I’m not alone in this.

Anxiety is an extremely fertile ground for fantasy theme development. In fact, it’s the only place, I believe, the worst fantasy themes can really take off.

Everyone uses fantasy themes, of course. Many are helpful and useful. My son thinks, for example, that I can fix anything and that I’m the greatest dad in the world. Both beliefs are completely and utterly false but this illusion protects him and lets him learn the value of trust and attachment, but I have to keep up my end to make that happen. He will discard these beliefs, of course, when he’s a teenager, and form another about how mindbogglingly stupid I am, only to discard that one around 25 or so. And so it goes.

Trump is anxious too. His supporters are as well. Many fear they are going to lose something if he does not get another term. Rather than confront this fear directly and form a coherent plan about future elections that involves the rest of the country’s wants, though, the wild west nature of half the internet combined with the wear and tear on the reputation of media outlets that fed Trump oxygen for years has given Trump voters a spectacular outlet for their anxiety.

So weird claims abound, and some days, even Fox News looks reasonable.

These claims don’t need to make much sense to fit into the shared illusion. They need only raise questions, and more questions, poking and prodding like a kid asking “why?” over and over, until the only answer is “I told you so,” the last argument of parents and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

There is no external argument to be made to a fantasy theme. It is completely self-sustaining and spreads easily, much like Covid. However, I do know of one thing that can shatter the hold of a fantasy theme.

Pretty much every postmodern novel since 1950 concerns itself with this question. The characters are enmeshed in a comfortable fantasy theme of some sort that avoids some structural unpleasantness in their lives and society. They grow uneasy and question the nature of reality and modernism. This conflict is brought to a head through some kind of violent act that kicks the protagonist into a new perspective that usually involves a spiritual reconnect to a supposed higher plane, though whatever form this new viewpoint takes, it’s really just another fantasy theme.

Perhaps a personal reckoning with reality isn’t enough anymore.

The center cannot hold, sure, but de-centering doesn’t seem to be holding very well lately, either, if people dying of Covid are refusing to believe they have Covid, a vaccine for a pandemic is seen as the problem, and gutting democracy is preferable to a one-term Democratic president, a critical alliance with Europe, better health care, and treating people that are not white as human beings with rights and dreams and value.

1860 comes to mind, when despite every slave state that eventually seceded having left Lincoln off the federal ballot, their inhabitants felt justified in declaring the union a tyranny.

But I’m being alarmist. There is nothing new under the sun, including saying there is nothing new under the sun.

At the height of classical Greece, a jury of 500 men in the world’s most famous democracy sentenced the most famous philosopher in the Western world to death for the crime of being really annoying. Richard Weaver, one of the few deans of Southern agrarian conservatism (and a noted rhetorician) once wrote a essay where he argued Socrates’s death sentence was just and deserved, as his open questioning of all of the Athenian sacred cows was a direct threat to the integrity of their culture. To allow him to wander the agora and speak to their inability to defend their arbitrary values could not be allowed to continue.

Weaver thus showcased the ultimate core value of conservatism – the preservation of a preferred culture in suspended political amber, the ironic elektron. The particulars are surprisingly unimportant compared to the steadiness of the refusal to move. Any inconsistencies or injustices or inhumanities are excusable as long as that central principle of culture in suspended animation is preserved.

Physics tells us that even the coldest atom is still vibrating with potential, but Weaver’s philosophy seems to take even that slow-motion quiver as a potential problem to be kept in check.

Refusal to acknowledge the election is over is, then, a massive and powerful fantasy theme of conservationism – a spectacular kind of shared hallucination that no change has happened. The silent majority triumphed. Four more years. Nothing to see here. All indications otherwise are fake news.

I am afraid, though, is that when that hallucination ends, one way or another, memories may fade and forgiveness may be doled out on an individual basis, but the internet has largely lost the ability to forget. This fantasy theme was recorded.

Every op-ed and Facebook post and tweet and text and letter and email insisting the election was rigged and Covid is just the flu and Trump is almost ready to finally destroy the deep state and launch an thousand-year reign of white civilization is now a permanent part of individual histories.

January 20 rolls around soon, and when it does, the Dark Marks will remain. They will not fade to scars. Slipping on a henley will not conceal them when anyone with a smartphone and half a brain can do a quick search.

Of course, in America, no conspiracy theorists rot in Azkaban. They will continue to roam the expanded agora, unlike Socrates, as long as they are peaceful. America remains more mature than Athens ever was, allowing even the dimmest philosophers and prophets to hold forth. The marketplace of ideas eventually devalues intellectual stock that bears no profit.

The Malfoys that tap out beforehand – and there is still plenty of time remaining – will rejoin and work with the centrist and center-left folks, as they always have, to build and grow the world. Perhaps they will cast themselves as victims of temporary insanity. It will be awkward. Second acts always are. But there is plenty of room for Slytherins in the world. Some of them have even been known to teach at Hogwarts.

I know that Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star.

No. He didn’t. I know that. He’s a fictional character in a fictional story played by an actor in a film in 1977.

Emotionally, though, I know Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. I saw him do it. I was there. I felt it. In some ways, I blew it up myself.

I know this as certain as my memories of the day I met my wife and when I was married and when our sons were born and when I earned my Ph.D. and every other major and minor life event. It is right up there, as it is the closest thing to straight-up myth that has ever come out of American storytelling.

Nobody thinks the events of The Godfather or Casablanca or Citizen Kane happened. Those are works of art and are clearly not real. Ditto Huck Finn and Grapes of Wrath and Beloved. They are all the tiniest of shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave compared to what, say, Disney’s Frozen has accomplished in terms of making images and sounds on film becomes something realer than real.

But today’s kids will never think the events of Frozen happened on an emotional level. Star Wars is the rare entry to a mythical category that even if you take all the works of narrative in human existence, only a few have reached. The Odyssey. The Bible. All five seasons of The Wire. Ok, maybe not the Bible.

I remember asking an old Arizona roommate watching our college basketball team play on TV why he kept referring to the team as if he was playing. “We” scored two points, “we” needed to play better defense, when “his” ass was clearly sitting on “our” couch drinking beer. His instant answer impressed me: “Well, I’d be playing with them right now if I could!”

He wanted to be there. And in a way, he was there, even though he wasn’t, and couldn’t play basketball worth a flip. Likewise, if Luke hadn’t pulled the trigger on the Death Star, I was ready to hop into an X-wing and do it myself, and I know millions felt the same way.

Star Wars offers a world where friends are always lifelong and brave and true, and evil is both dastardly and easy to identify. Our world is monstrous, uncaring, and gray. Star Wars is only a gray universe in the sense that no one seems to wash their spaceships regularly save the Empire, which marks them as completely evil and makes Finn’s janitorial background in Awakens apropos.

Heroic journeys in such a universe have a narrow set of reasonable plots. You can take away the hero’s strength and have them prove themselves without it. You can make them doubt themselves so they can regain faith and resume their quest. You can threaten the people they love so they can save them. Or, in the least interesting variant, you can give them a worthy opponent to defeat. Or you do all of these at once, which Star Wars does.

Good myths allow straightforward and uncomplicated tests of virtue. We like to identify ourselves with a cocky kid from a farm who would climb into a spaceship we’ve never flown before and fly a suicide mission to save people we’ve never met and do it with one second left with our first shot only with the help of true friendship. The Russians never built a Death Star, but the most pacifistic American would have blown it and its tens of thousands of employees to smithereens in the 80s had an X-wing been available.

It was never a tough call. It still isn’t. And it’s all very silly.

Emotionally, though, it’s quite real. And it’s not silly. Not at all. Not because there are no Death Stars or X-wings, but because in the real world, Death Stars and X-wings are far harder to identify. They can take almost any form, and most disturbingly, the people sitting in the Death Stars think they’d make that trench run, too, not thinking about how they are far closer to a comfortable bureaucrat like Moff Tarkin than any honest rebel scum.

As for the ones sitting in the cockpit of an X-wing, they usually don’t have Red Squadron backing them up, and so they never get the nerve to make that trench run when it comes time. There are moisture farms to maintain, droid-free bars to tend, profitable mining operations to supervise and deals to make with the Empire. You know how it is. You can’t change the world, right?

Subtracting these two catatonic groups leaves only the shady criminal underworld that seems to be 90% of the Star Wars galaxy population. That’s probably why Jabba the Hutt passes for the leader of the free world these days. And of course, he thinks he’s Luke Skywalker.

But he’s not. Luke Skywalker is the guy who blew up the Death Star. Or, rather, he was the guy who realized he could blow up the Death Star and did, with a little help from his friends. Self-actualization is part of everyone’s dream.

Sure, call it space opera, puerile escapism, a childish thing that should be put away, the new ones not up to snuff with the old, even, if you’re feeling purist. But most narrative can’t touch a sliver of what that film did and still does.

Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress is often cited as a precursor to Star Wars from a stylistic sense, but the one that I think of more is Ikiru, which, if you accept my analogy, is about a broken man who thinks he has toiled inside a Death Star for years and then suddenly realizes he’s in an X-wing and there’s a trench in front of him – and then he makes the trench run.

But Kurosawa doesn’t end the film there. The last third of Ikiru is the man’s funeral, attended by his depressed coworkers, who eventually depart without any confidence they will be able to duplicate his feat in their terminally bureaucratic mindsets. His brief glimpse of the ultimate is thus passing, brief, and lost, save to the viewer, perhaps.

That is cinema. Star Wars is not cinema, not by Scorsese’s standards, certainly. There is no hard look at the inevitable nature of death and the corrupt duality of man; Skywalker is not FMJ’s Joker. But his moment of surrender to the Force that allows the trench run repeats endlessly in an eternal present that is only dated a long, long time ago. He will always be right there, ready to make the trench run again, forever in my streaming queue.

I watch the first film when it has been too long since I felt the quiet rush that comes with doing something unquestionably good. Empire is better, a classic, surely, far more artfully written and presented. And Return juggles its end-of-the-trilogy job as well as it possibly could have. But they don’t have the moral clarity and epistemic power of a classic myth. The Death Star was destroyed, yes, but it will also be destroyed tomorrow and the day after that, as much as Luke fired the causal torpedo and will do so again.

The story will be retold as it was told before.

I am in the middle of reading The Hobbit to my five-year-old son. We get through a few pages a night.

He does not understand much of it yet, but he does understand there is a journey, and there are heroes and those that help them, and there are bad guys, and there is suspense and danger and more than a little humor. He is often worried about the progress of Bilbo and the dwarves, and why Gandalf is so cantankerous and unreliable.

I reassure him even as Mirkwood closes in, though. I know how the story ends, I tell him. I’ve read it before. It was the same last time, as it will be once more. Bilbo did get to the Lonely Mountain and back again. I’m as certain of that as I know that Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. The narrative is fiction, but the emotional truth is not.

Humans respond to a call to the good in different ways – indifference, cynicism, opportunism, name your sin. The best reaction that we can build and encourage is a default urge to help despite danger. My son’s admiration for firefighters – it was not long ago he watched some fight a fire a street over from ours – suggests he is on a certain path where he will have some resistance to the default quiet ambivalence I’ve noted in most, where the world is what it is, and he holds no responsibility to improve anything but his own lot.

Perhaps I have overstated my case, though. Perhaps he will grow up and dutifully fire the giant laser that destroys Alderaan. I doubt this, however. He does not respond well to orders. I can’t even reliably get him to go to bed on time, and his sneaky methods of candy acquisition suggest I am raising a Han rather than a Luke.

But his sense of right and wrong is developing on schedule, in fits and starts, much like mine continues to develop. Anything that can keep us going in the right direction helps – even a fictional past.

So I will read to him as Bilbo nears the Lonely Mountain, and we will watch Luke take out the Death Star again and again. The impossible will always be there when we need it to remind ourselves of what is possible.