Day 343…
If this were an episode of Supernatural, we be would just beginning to wonder what was going on. Everything seems so normal and almost pleasant.
We would be starting to throw each other questioning glances as we ran into people who were just carelessly going about their lives. Where’s the drama? Where are the protests? What happened to the daily barrage of lies and angry filth emanating from the White House?
Weirdly, the President of the United States held a Town Hall last night where he answered questions from citizens. Actual questions. Actual citizens.
It was peculiar.
He had empathy. He comforted a little girl and told her not to be scared, “You are going to be fine and we are going to make sure mommy is fine, too."
To a woman who wasn’t having any luck finding a vaccine for her son who has a pre-existing condition he said, “But here’s what I’ll do. If you’re willing, I’ll stay around after this is over and maybe we can talk a few minutes and see if I can get you some help,”
If this were an episode of Supernatural, as soon as the Town Hall was over and the cameras shut off, the President’s eyes would have turned black and fangs would have emerged from his teeth and he’d drop to all fours, eviscerate the little girl and feast on her entrails. Strangely, that doesn’t seem to have happened. Instead, the little girl just went home, presumably somewhat comforted, and President Biden met with the concerned woman and has likely put someone onto the task of helping her to get her son vaccinated.
My niece is who put me onto Supernatural and I am now coming to the end of season twelve. It is, apparently, endless. These are full old-school seasons with 23 episodes each. It finally finished shooting after fifteen seasons and its finale aired this past year.
I don’t know that my niece has watched the last episodes yet because she doesn’t want it to end. Before she had me watch a couple of episodes of it this past year, I had never even heard of it.
Every time Michael walks into the room while I am watching it, somebody is screaming and there is blood everywhere. It disturbs him to no end. He won’t watch. The cast, of course, is very attractive so he always at least stops and asks what is going on. I have to go through the complicated demonology chronology that has unfolded up to that point. It’s so confusing that it eventually causes him to lose interest and walk away.
When I was my niece’s age Star Wars is what I watched obsessively. In many ways, it turned out to be my way into beginning to see the underlying structures of religion.
Star Wars director, George Lucas, followed the general outline of the world’s mythology that Joseph Campbell discussed in his book, The Hero with A Thousand Faces. Comparing the stories of the world’s religions and mythologies, Campbell found that most all of them share many similarities. In his introduction to the book when describing what he calls the hero’s journey, he says, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Watching the Star Wars saga unfold helped me as a young teenager put what I was seeing around me in the world into some kind of perspective.
The two leads of Supernatural fight evil and the darkness in an epic journey that leaves Odysseus in the dust. Michael worries about the level of violence that my niece is watching. I, on the other hand, am thrilled that she is getting a small window into what is a much bigger picture. That it comes with a certain amount of decapitation is probably unfortunate, but, after all, how many storm troopers bite the dust as the Star Wars saga unfolds?
Neither of those series are as violent as the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
In their original story the princess actually turns the frog into a prince by hurling it against a wall, not by kissing it. After he turns into a prince, she then spends the night with him.
In later editions, the Brothers Grimm toned down the sex but amped up the violence. In a story called The Robber Bridegroom, bandits drag a girl into their cellar, force her to drink wine until her heart bursts, rip off her clothes and then hack her to pieces. In their original Cinderella story, the stepsisters hack off their toes so their feet can fit into the slipper. In Snow White, the evil queen dies after being made to dance in red-hot iron shoes. Lots of kids bite the dust in the stories and several are eaten by their murderers.
The collection of stories that the Grimms put together was originally an attempt on their parts to preserve the Germanic oral tradition. The finished product was intended for adults as well as children. As they became more and more popular, the stories became tamer and tamer so that adults would feel comfortable allowing their children to read them. The Victorians added moralizing lessons to them and replaced their raw sexual aspects with more flowery depictions of chaste romantic love. Disney then Disney-fied them.
Even so, the first movie that I was ever taken to was Disney’s Bambi. Not in its initial release, thank you very much, but about twenty-some-odd years later when I was about 4 or 5. I was so traumatized by Bambi’s mother getting shot that my own mother had to evacuate me from the theatre.
Bruno Bettelheim, a world-renowned psychoanalyst who died in 1990, was critical of the move away from the violence. He felt that it weakened the stories usefulness in allowing readers to symbolically work through their own internal issues. Carl Jung felt that fairy tales were spontaneous expressions of the soul. He said, “In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche”.
In other words, by experiencing these stories conflicts in their most extreme forms, the child’s subconscious can use them to resolve its own more mundane and, hopefully, much less extreme, conflicts.
In ‘The Princess Bride’ Peter Falk, playing a kind and direct grandfather, reads a bedtime story to his young grandson played by Fred Savage who is at home sick in bed and bored. The grandson doesn’t want to hear the story but eventually the grandfather wears him down and he gets pulled into it.
At a particularly tense moment in the middle of the tale, the grandfather sensing his grandson’s anxiety offers to stop reading. The grandson is horrified and begs him to continue to the end. Afterwards he gives his grandfather permission to come back and read it to him again. If he wants.
It feels like over the last four years that we have all lived through a violent and extreme thriller. That said, we now have a President who is the living fairy tale embodiment of the kind and gentle grandfather. Despite the fact that what lies ahead of him seems daunting and possibly unsolvable, there is something about his easiness and elderly confidence that inspires trust that he will be able to fix it. Everything will be OK because he says so.
Our country seems to have an unquenchable thirst for stories about the Nazis and World War II. They are everywhere. As we all watched the rise of fascism and white supremacy in our own country under our last President, watching and reading those stories about the rise of fascism then, was in equal measures anxiety-provoking but also oddly comforting.
The French TV series, ‘A French Village’ was ultimately calming in that while we experienced the Nazis occupying a French town with clenched teeth and terror, we also were also then able to watch them being defeated. Seeing how those characters dealt with what was before them probably raised more questions within me about what I would do myself than it answered. By the end, though, I felt that I was much clearer about the reality of what the rise of our ex-President’s base might portend. Preparing for what you know is coming is infinitely easier than being surprised by it.
Both ‘The Plot Against America’ and ‘The Man in the High Castle’ are series that explored alternate realities. What would have happened had we not entered into World War II and fought the rise of fascism and what would have happened if the Nazis had won the war. That, neither of those isn’t what happened then, in some way can give us the strength to make sure that they don’t happen now.
The story of the January 6th insurrection is almost certainly going to pop up in many of our narratives moving forward. Nothing that we experienced through this past administration was as tailor made for storytelling than that was. Good guys, bad guys and extreme violence. It has it all. A cautionary tale if there ever was one.
Today, my niece went back to in-person schooling for the first time in months.
I am oddly comforted by the fact that she has watched the entire Supernatural saga. It seems to me, that getting through all of that will make what she is sure to face moving forward just that much easier to deal with. She has watched two guys give it their all fighting against unimaginable horrors. They literally both go to hell and back. Several times. Dealing with mere high school students will pale in comparison.
I trust that she won’t actually physically decapitate anyone who gets in her way, but if she can do that emotionally, then those stories will have done what all the stories we tell each other should do - give us the objectivity and strength to confront what comes up in our lives.
President Biden is not going to fix everything, but wow does it feel better listening to him than it did listening to the last guy. It’s like the teacher left us in the room for a few minutes to go somewhere and the class bully took over. Now the teacher is back, and order has been restored. The bully is still there and still the bully, but the teacher has his eye on him.
Whether or not we are in good enough hands remains to be seen. At the moment, though, I am fine with just being in better, kinder and more empathetic hands. After the horrifying story we’ve just lived through, having Grandpa Biden now staying with us lets me sleep better at night.
Some days, my daily routine seems like a cage. Today, it feels comforting.
Go figure.
More snow tomorrow, but today is fine.
As my Jersey Boys boss puts it at the end of every email - Onward.
❤️Onward then, with Supernatural 💫💫💫