Canto I

A game of Saints and Dragons.

The Dragon, large green scales and a long spiked tail, appears outside the White House: "Because you needed me, I have come," says the Dragon. That night, St. George menacingly waves a bag of crack cocaine across his nose on television.

"This scourge must end!" proclaims St. George, putting on his heaviest suit of armor. Rides his black horse to the South to confront the Dragon. "Understand," says St. George, "without a Dragon, I could not be a Saint."

A battle ensues for the Mind of the planet. I imagine that the duel rages up and down the Andes, spinal cord of the Western Hemisphere. As in the ancient tales, it is an epic clash between Good and Evil. But which is which? The only observers, the Sun and the Moon, can be excused if confused.

Coleridge believes St. George combats the Dragon in "mental space," that is, in "the land of the fairy." Can't you feel the false walls, between inner and outer, between foreign and domestic policy, crumble?

I smoke marijuana on the mountain at midnight. The moon turns the trees white. In my mental space, a lazy Dragon. A shining green dissident Dragon who does not give a fuck about fighting. Dangerous Dragon. St. George is here too. Must be careful.

Canto II

I am reading newspaper clips about the War on Drugs -- boring, depressing newspaper clips. Occasionally, though, there is one that really gets to me:

I feel like an archaeologist, as if I were sorting through bones of a past that is still in the future, trying to see how it all fits together. I begin to doze off. In the slot between waking and sleeping I see a dragon and a knight. A green voice announces: "St. George and the Dragon." A memory byte flickers; the comedian Stan Freeberg's subversion of that story on a record some years ago. Shaken awake, I find this impulse more illuminating than the stack of clips in front of me. I call a few record stores, but no one's got Freeberg. I call the library, referred to the children's room. No, no record but they do have a couple books: St. George and the Dragon, by Margaret Hodges and Kenneth Graheme's wonderfully absurd Reluctant Dragon. The man behind the desk in the children's room tells me that if I am really interested in the legend of St. George and the Dragon, then I must read Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, where the story is told in full flower. First published in 1590, Spenser's tale is an allegory for then ascendant England conquering demons in foreign lands, as well as a treatise on the imagination. The book has also been read by some as a text of recovery, a spiritual voyage through 12 "moral virtues." The key confrontation, between St. George and the Dragon, occurs in Book One, Canto XI.

Canto III

"I need a Dragon to slay," St. George tells his staff of public relations flacks, "for I fear the population does not accord me the proper respect. I need a villain to divert attention from the depraved state of affairs that betrays my rule. And I need a demon, for I must send my armies South."

From Cold War to Ambiguous War. The central paradox of postmodern political propaganda: a demon must be "clearer than truth itself," yet remain in the shadows. So in today's recasting of St. George and the Dragon, St. George is clearly presented as the president of a once prosperous nation in the North. While the Dragon, the poor Dragon, is what? "Drugs"? "Addicts"? "Dealers"? "Guerrillas"? "Narcoterrorists"? "Drug Lords"? "Pot Heads"? "Erythroxilon Novogranatense" -- The Evil Coca Bush itself? We are only sure of one thing: the enemy emanates from the South.

Canto IV

South, the Source. That region we discover when we get down, down deep, beneath the bones, to the "inner" city, the "other side" of the border, the "third" world...the "periphery"....

Canto V

Canto VI

Canto VII

Although in the end we may never know precisely why, St. George dons his armour and heads South, announcing he will "go to the source" to eradicate the Dragon. From the beginning, things don't go well. The jungle is too hot and humid for maneuvers and the mosquitoes are murder. Local militaries, whether they call themselves Colombian, Peruvian, or Bolivian, all receive training by the Pentagon and are hopelessly corrupt. Of course you can't drink the water, and the whores all have AIDS, the beer's flat, and now you can't eat the fish -- which is the only decent food they got down here -- and every so often guerrillas send a headless body floating down stream with a sign reading "Welcome Yanqui." The people are a disagreeable lot; you don't know whose side they're on, but they don't speak English and the women laugh behind their hands when you come into town. Last night the guerrillas murdered 10 villagers. A unit from the military murdered 50, then shot down an American drug-enforcement plane trying to raid a coke lab nearby. The Green Berets are all berserk motherfuckers and none of the freaking lasers shoot straight; the helicopters are always down for one reason or another; the mail never comes on time, and Armed Forces Radio goes dead whenever there's a football game.

St. George is a man on a mission. And his frustration, boredom, and tension rise without relief. He starts smoking cigarettes again, starts smoking a lot of cigarettes. It's bitterly ironic, he thinks, fighting a war, on drugs. His mood turns sour. The other day he hit the little Indian kid who does the laundry, accusing him of being a guerrilla. Then he strangled the camp dog. Suddenly his mood changes, that is, he feels a lot better, stronger, more optimistic. He is sure he can whip that Dragon, even though there are miles and miles and miles and miles of coca fields (these are just the ones he knows about, and every time he destroys one field, 50 more spring up the next day, like scales regenerating on the back of a Dragon). He's fired up, raring to go. Then one day he realizes that someone's been lacing his cigarettes with cocaine. And worse, he admits to himself that he likes it. He's smoking from before he wakes up to when, if ever, he goes to sleep. Self-esteem crawls out of him like little albino rodents. He looks in the mirror. A shrunken head!

Canto VIII

St. George may want to slay a Dragon, but does he really want to eliminate coca/cocaine? For example:

Administration officials said the dispatch of more than 50 advisers, including Green Berets and Navy personnel, reflects an emerging view that Peru is losing control of its Andean provinces to the drug barons and to the rebels of the Maoist movement Sendero Luminoso....

Canto IX

"A dream sequence, Doc, from the Upper Huallaga Valley: I am a small boy. It is Christmas time in Connecticut. Snow falls upward through the floor of my house and war toys surround the tree: plastic tanks, bazookas, battalions of miniature soldiers. My mother wants me to shovel the kitchen. But an evil pineapple has taken over the rumpus room in the basement, causing the snow to stream into our home. To stop the snow, I must remove that rotten fruit. I push the troops down stairs. Cautiously I invade. Then I scream a silent scream when I see an abominable snowman -- Nancy Reagan in drag! -- blowing its nose in time to a rumba by Xavier Cougat. The snow storm surges. Snow piles up. Snow...drifts."

Canto X

My friend believes I should not say things like "graceless preppy" when referring to St. George. She looks for more sympathy seeping his way, greater understanding. "After all, he is," she states with little conviction, "he's not a comic book character." She doesn't get the dream sequence. Thinks maybe it's too rhetorical to say that the Peruvian, Colombian, and Bolivian militaries are all corrupt. "It sounds like your Babar poems," she says, meaning, I think, that she considers the piece to be immature, one-sided, and screechy.

I say to myself, not to her: this is what you get when you live in an age when thousands of species of angels, monsters, and fairies are being liquidated every hour, when the imagination is shunned, when difference no longer can be tolerated even as eccentric or "far out," when exploration must be considered harmful, illegal, even immoral.

It is fashionable in some circles to privilege "education" above "law enforcement" when fighting the War on Drugs. These categories are not mutually exclusive. For as Mr. William Bennett points out:

If we do not grasp the "message effective law enforcement sends" we miss the wellspring of the War on Drugs.

Canto XI

According to Isabel G. MacCaffrey (1976), Spenser intends the battle between St. George and the Dragon to represent the resurrection of Christ. This, she argues, was the symbolism of the scene as it was painted throughout the Middle Ages. As such, it is a transformative moment, the instant of the Spirit's triumph over Death and Darkness. In my reading, the battle also celebrates the primary metaphor of "northern civilization": The Conquest.

But today it is "northern civilization" under siege. Listen once more to retired czar William Bennett, who must be forgiven for his faltering sense of direction:

I agree with this and with what Mr. Bennett said earlier -- that "[t]he last two decades saw a draining away of legitimacy from our existing institutions and prevailing cultural values, beliefs, and responsibilities." For is it not true that "northern civilization" loses its authority, and indeed acts as the agent of its own deconstruction, as it increasingly comes into contradiction with the possibility of continued life on this planet? To replay the legend of St. George and the Dragon in the guise of the War on Drugs, or the Gulf War for that matter, is to recycle past crusades in the service of contemporary crises. Only consumers of packaged reverie can believe it.

Mr. Bennett says the "West" must be defended because "it is good." Alas!

The Dragon appears one night while St. George is trying to get to sleep. "Because you needed me, I have come," says the Dragon wistfully, then rears up on her spike-studded tail and shakes the valley with a colossal roar. She clears her throat and a fireball nearly incinerates St. George before he gets a chance to pick up his shield. A swing of the huge tail almost decapitates him. St. George grabs his M-16 and fires off 50 rounds right into the Dragon's neck, but the bullets just bounce off her shiny green scales.

When the Leviathan swipes at St. George with her iron claws, in Spenser's version the knight falls into a well of holy water. No such luck for the president. He falls into a toxic waste dump. It rains that night, but the water only falls on the Dragon who awakes refreshed in the morning, just as St. George is crawling out of the dump. The Dragon stomps on his fingers and breaks his glasses. St. George tries to radio for relief, but the Dragon blows forth a gushing river of black phlegm, shorting out the radio and not quite drowning St. George in the muck. The Dragon doesn't let up for a minute. She doesn't even give St. George time out to pee. The president fires a missile, but the Dragon easily wraps it up in her wings, cleans her toenails, then casually tosses it back in St. George's face where it bursts like a Boston cream pie. Then she hurls a barrage of mortal stingers, and St. George falls over again. Spenser had him fall up against the Tree of Life, but in the epic at hand all the trees have been cut down. On the third morning, St. George opens his mouth to pray. Zap! The Dragon's blazing eyes flare down his throat. Spenser says it all:

So it is that the president ends his days twitching uncontrollably in St. Elizabeth's. Meanwhile, the Dragon decides to live by the sea, a contemplative life, swept up in the moods of the cosmos.

Canto XII

So it is through the War on Drugs, 500 years after The Conquest, that we rediscover the "South." That which is ancient, repressed, impoverished, outcast, feminine, failed, feared and forgotten...

The Serpent...

The rebel, the hot, the artist, the wet, the dissident, the dark, the mysterious stranger...

You could call it your "Cellar," your "Soul."

Me, I discovered my

"Home."

-- for Manuel Naula (Fall 1991)

REFERENCE

MacCaffrey, Isabel G.