The Uses of Enchantment

I awoke earlier this week to the unedifying image of Darth Vader (a.k.a. Donald Rumsfeld) locked in a loving embrace with Spiderman and Superman. The Horror! I promptly choked on my rye crackers, spilled my coffee all over myself, and had to spend half an hour flogging my native slaves before I recovered my equanimity and could turn to the newspaper again.

Darth Vader, it turned out, had recruited the services of Marvel Comics to help raise the morale of the Jesustani hordes now engaged, unsuccessfully, in putting Babylon to the sword. Now, the idiots should have known better; Saddam Hussein tried, and he didn’t get anywhere, even with the aid of mustard gas (as anyone who has tried to hunt down rats with a jackboot will attest, the vermin usually have the best of the contest, but I digress).

Anyway, it turned out the leaders of the crusaders believe that their rank-and-file will be filled with renewed valor when they are treated to comic strips in which Captain America hunts down the terrorists. Once I’d finished giving my goras forty of the best, I snorted with derision at the stupidity of Jesustanis in general, and of Darth Vader in particular, and decided to get to the truly interesting part of the newspaper (you know, where they have the wench with the enormous …, but I digress, again).

Then, it hit me: these people actually believe in fairy tales. This is precisely what makes the Jesustanis such a magnificent people. Culture in Jesustani is profoundly reliant on enchantment, on the conviction that several impossible things can in fact happen before breakfast. Enchantment is a profound historical force. Jesustanis have come to rule the world, after all, and they have done so propelled by by the belief that there is actually some point to doing so. It is my conviction that the real reason that the Soviet Union collapsed was not economic ruin or systemic decay: it was cynicism.

Of this ignoble sentiment, the Jesustanis are innocent. Innocence works: the fact is that more Jesustanis seem to live happily than most other peoples. You may assert that this is as much the consequence of Prozac as of prosperity, but that changes reality not one whit. Jesustanis believe in god, in the virtues of motherhood and in fidelity and honor, and still they are happy. They believe that their Beloved Leader will tell them The Truth, and they believe The Truth is out there, so help them god. Jesustanis even believe that Hindustani shopkeepers will hand them the right change (I have never seen anyone count it): and still they are happy.

Enchantment manifests itself across the entire terrain of popular culture. Witness the belief of large numbers of otherwise sane people that Terri Schiavo, a woman who had been brain dead for two decades and more, would at some point jumped off her hospice bed and headed to McDonalds if only her heathen husband had not decided to remove her feeding tube. Or consider what you can buy at any mid-sized store: bacteria-proof pens (we can all be healthy all the time) and plant-foggers with battery-powered fans (the flowers, the advertisements claim, find it refreshing). I’m reasonably convinced it is only a matter of time before somebody starts selling a device that masturbates dogs (after all, they too are entitled to happiness, but public intercourse between animals is considered indecorous in Jesustan) .

A fable helped me make sense of the whole issue:

A Jesustani man and his wife were playing golf. A stroke went astray, and shattered the windows of one of their club’s guest rooms. The man and his wife rushed in, only to be stopped short by the sight of naked man lying unconscious on the floor. They revived him, and apologized profusely for their carelessness. The man, however, replied that he was actually grateful to them. “However hard it may seem to believe”, he said, “I am actually a genie. I had been imprisoned inside that flower-vase, which your golf-ball shattered, for five thousand years. As a sign of my gratitude, and in keeping with the traditions of my people, I will grant any three wishes you make”.

The man asked for a billion dollars, his wife for beach-home in Bermuda, and both for perpetual happiness. “Done, done”, cried the genie, “done”! Overwhelmed by gratitude, the couple asked the genie if there was anything they could do in return. He was at first reticent, but finally, very quietly, pointed out that he had been without a women for five thousand years (a common fate for single South Indian men as well, I am told). The husband looked at his wife; the wife at her husband – and both agreed that it was but a small sacrifice for the genie’s munificence. And so the deed was done, and the time for pillow-talk arrived, and the genie asked the wife how old she was. “Thirty-five”, she answered, “why”?

“Aren’t you a little old to believe in genies”?

Most of the world is. The Jesustanis are not.