The Dragons by Dean Williams
Lions” or the “Hillsdale Eagles”. But not all neighborhoods selected such conventional names: there were the “Bethany Spinners”, the “Gravesend Rowdies”, and even the “Laurel Heights Wastrels”, to choose just a few examples from America. Each banner was mounted on a hand-carved wooden staff and sat in a gimbaled belt. The lucky bearer more often than not had to out-drink all his neighbors for the honor of carrying the banner. Later on, wearing a t-shirt near a dragon would have been considered blasphemous. But let us not get ahead of ourselves! At this point, the garment and textile industries were just thanking their lucky stars for the coming of the dragons and the new business opportunities they represented.
The full secular flowering of the dragon song achieved the status of true folk-songs. These natural outpourings and expressions of the populace’s hopes, fears and passions became an indelible part of our popular culture and they were recorded, anthologized, and analyzed by ethnographers and musical historians in countless languages and countries. Like the dragons themselves, they were compelling but more than a little mysterious in form and provenance. Some were simple, humorous, and didn’t appear to have too much at all to do with the dragons:
Ate all my spinach, but I’m not so strong,
Saturdays are short, Mondays are long,
Told my boss to shove it, I got the boot,
It don't matter, cuz life’s just a hoot….
Or:
Got beer, got snacks, so I’m all set.
Got a dragon on the TV, keep it as a pet.
with a rousing refrain of “Hey, hey, what the hell!!”
These amusing ditties hadn’t strayed far from their roots as marching chants. Similar in tone were songs in which the dragons appeared as figures of fun, or as foils to the fantastic, Baron Münchhausen-like exploits of the protagonist:
I’ve flown around the world in a pink balloon,
Sailed the seven seas in a plastic spoon
Finally found a dragon I could call my own
Now we’re living large in a trailer home!
Lighthearted pieces like this one typically went on for many verses. Many of the lyrics were improvised, and people liked to sing them at a window-rattling volume.
13
But as time went on the songs began to touch on darker themes. People started to sing about their families, about unrequited love; they sang about the difficulty of making a living, about war, about all the vicissitudes of human life. It was also around this time that the dragon songs began to acquire names. Before they had been referred to as “that spinach song”, or “the one about the drunk guy”, and the like. But these more serious lyrics called for the dignity of titles. Here is one of the first songs with an anti-war message, a topic that became increasingly popular. Its title was “Coat of Sadness”:
She wore a coat of sadness
For her man had gone off to war.
She cried out, it was madness
That her man had gone off to war.
Once the songs began to move in the direction of protest music their progress was rapid and unstoppable. It was as if the people had only been waiting for an opportunity to express their feelings of dissatisfaction, disappointment, and anger at their political and economic leaders over a host of issues. And although the circumstances under which these songs were being performed were new—masses of people marching to a park to hang out with dragons—the tone and message owed a lot to the past. A protest song like “Standing in the Rain” would not have been out of place at a 60’s campus sit-in:
When a man’s done his level best
But got nothing for his pains…
When there’s no money in his pocket
And he’s standin’ in the rain….
The authorities became worried as this type of song became more prevalent. Worry turned to real fear when the neighborhood teams started to combine, creating moving masses of hundreds and even thousands of citizens, chanting and carrying their gigantic banners. Even in so-called democracies, popular unrest leading to violent revolutions had been known to arise from far less incendiary conditions. With the surveillance cameras gone and corporate media no longer welcome among the people, they could no longer sit back and monitor the situation from the comfort of a computer operations center. They had to send actual people out into the street to monitor the situation and contact them with radio or cell phones. And that simple action now carried its own risks, because people had begun to behave differently in public.
It’s rather difficult to put in words, but one was distinctly conscious when walking down the street of a new energy in the air. People were far more communicative than before, much more willing to stop a friend or acquaintance in the street, begin a conversation, and sustain it. The frantic multitasking, the clutching of a smart-phone as if it were a magic amulet, became yet another vanishing sight from our recent, unlamented past.
As if the healing aura surrounding the dragons had spread everywhere, things just slowed down. Express trains still ran, people continued to eat fast food, but our everyday social behavior had begun to alter in ways that militated against these practices and habits. This civilizational deceleration revealed itself in forms large and small. We talked to each other a lot more now. We even looked at each other more. People felt themselves to be more connected than formerly, not just to their family and friends, but to casual acquaintances and even strangers. Once could almost perceive the emotional sinews of human society growing tighter and stronger every day.
Because we were spending more time with each other, we developed increasingly sensitive social antennae. Before, people had found it normal, even psychologically necessary, to ignore the annoying Other. No longer. The substitute world that we had through our own passivity and inaction let metastasize around us began to fade out, bit by plasticine bit. And as it did so, we were regaining our innate propensity and talent for awareness of other human beings.
Inconveniently for the security state, this meant that it was no longer a simple matter to station strangers on street corners to watch us. The category of “legitimate nonparticipant” was not recognized by communities any more. Just as we now didn’t accept being under surveillance or being ‘covered’ by news organizations, we no longer tolerated outsiders being present when we gathered. “Join us—you’re more than welcome. Or leave.” That was now our message to every stranger who entered our neighborhood.
This was the hard fist hiding under the soft, pleasing fabric of our emerging, hyper-interactive civilization. Togetherness was what we now yearned for, togetherness and real belonging. And any aspect of modern life that detracted from this unity, no matter how indispensable it might have seemed before, began to be remorselessly eliminated.
Yet something was still lacking—that mysterious element that must be present for a citizen to join a demonstration or even to leap up and volunteer to man a barricade rather than retreat into the anonymous security of the crowd. That missing ingredient, it would turn out, was love.
For the moment, no matter how loud and enthusiastic the crowd, the inevitable conclusion of our mass marches was not a bang but a whimper. Rather than head for the nearest large public area and take the demonstration to the next level, at some point the people always broke up into their neighborhood teams and headed peacefully to their customary park or small square, where the dragons were waiting. One could almost hear the sigh of relief from the police and the political leadership. Later they were to find that their reaction was premature, to say the least.
14
The dragon songs continued to evolve. One could now hear songs that didn't fit in any traditional category. They weren’t social or political critiques, nor were they romantic or humorous in nature. They seemed to occupy a new and hybrid genre, one that was springing up in the strange, fertile space the dragons seemed to have opened up in our collective consciousness. The haunting “Thousand Eyes” is a good example:
The city has a thousand eyes
But none have
eyes for me.
The busy street, the crowded bar,
And who is there for me?
It shares a certain speculative, meditative tone with the other songs being created at this time. Our marching style altered accordingly: the exuberant, bouncing rhythm gave way to a slower, more measured cadence. And we stopped clowning around during the march, drinking alcohol, passing around snacks, etc. We just took the whole thing more seriously.
It was noticed that elderly people seemed to participate in greater numbers when people were singing this type of song. And once they came out into the streets to join in, they stayed with us.
For a period of about six months the dragons themselves had a decidedly more marginal presence in the lyrics of the songs. It was as if we humans had things to work out amongst ourselves before we could return to them, before we could confront, clear-eyed and without distractions, these new and enigmatic additions to our world. And this seemed essential suddenly: that our view of them be as lucid and objective as possible. We had begun to feel that the dragons were somehow important. As imperceptibly as spring turns to summer, they had ceased being mere spectacles and curiosities of nature, alien creatures useful for the mild high they gave us. The dragons had become linked to us in a strange and unexpected way. And there were now those among us who believed that their coming had awakened a force
The full secular flowering of the dragon song achieved the status of true folk-songs. These natural outpourings and expressions of the populace’s hopes, fears and passions became an indelible part of our popular culture and they were recorded, anthologized, and analyzed by ethnographers and musical historians in countless languages and countries. Like the dragons themselves, they were compelling but more than a little mysterious in form and provenance. Some were simple, humorous, and didn’t appear to have too much at all to do with the dragons:
Ate all my spinach, but I’m not so strong,
Saturdays are short, Mondays are long,
Told my boss to shove it, I got the boot,
It don't matter, cuz life’s just a hoot….
Or:
Got beer, got snacks, so I’m all set.
Got a dragon on the TV, keep it as a pet.
with a rousing refrain of “Hey, hey, what the hell!!”
These amusing ditties hadn’t strayed far from their roots as marching chants. Similar in tone were songs in which the dragons appeared as figures of fun, or as foils to the fantastic, Baron Münchhausen-like exploits of the protagonist:
I’ve flown around the world in a pink balloon,
Sailed the seven seas in a plastic spoon
Finally found a dragon I could call my own
Now we’re living large in a trailer home!
Lighthearted pieces like this one typically went on for many verses. Many of the lyrics were improvised, and people liked to sing them at a window-rattling volume.
13
But as time went on the songs began to touch on darker themes. People started to sing about their families, about unrequited love; they sang about the difficulty of making a living, about war, about all the vicissitudes of human life. It was also around this time that the dragon songs began to acquire names. Before they had been referred to as “that spinach song”, or “the one about the drunk guy”, and the like. But these more serious lyrics called for the dignity of titles. Here is one of the first songs with an anti-war message, a topic that became increasingly popular. Its title was “Coat of Sadness”:
She wore a coat of sadness
For her man had gone off to war.
She cried out, it was madness
That her man had gone off to war.
Once the songs began to move in the direction of protest music their progress was rapid and unstoppable. It was as if the people had only been waiting for an opportunity to express their feelings of dissatisfaction, disappointment, and anger at their political and economic leaders over a host of issues. And although the circumstances under which these songs were being performed were new—masses of people marching to a park to hang out with dragons—the tone and message owed a lot to the past. A protest song like “Standing in the Rain” would not have been out of place at a 60’s campus sit-in:
When a man’s done his level best
But got nothing for his pains…
When there’s no money in his pocket
And he’s standin’ in the rain….
The authorities became worried as this type of song became more prevalent. Worry turned to real fear when the neighborhood teams started to combine, creating moving masses of hundreds and even thousands of citizens, chanting and carrying their gigantic banners. Even in so-called democracies, popular unrest leading to violent revolutions had been known to arise from far less incendiary conditions. With the surveillance cameras gone and corporate media no longer welcome among the people, they could no longer sit back and monitor the situation from the comfort of a computer operations center. They had to send actual people out into the street to monitor the situation and contact them with radio or cell phones. And that simple action now carried its own risks, because people had begun to behave differently in public.
It’s rather difficult to put in words, but one was distinctly conscious when walking down the street of a new energy in the air. People were far more communicative than before, much more willing to stop a friend or acquaintance in the street, begin a conversation, and sustain it. The frantic multitasking, the clutching of a smart-phone as if it were a magic amulet, became yet another vanishing sight from our recent, unlamented past.
As if the healing aura surrounding the dragons had spread everywhere, things just slowed down. Express trains still ran, people continued to eat fast food, but our everyday social behavior had begun to alter in ways that militated against these practices and habits. This civilizational deceleration revealed itself in forms large and small. We talked to each other a lot more now. We even looked at each other more. People felt themselves to be more connected than formerly, not just to their family and friends, but to casual acquaintances and even strangers. Once could almost perceive the emotional sinews of human society growing tighter and stronger every day.
Because we were spending more time with each other, we developed increasingly sensitive social antennae. Before, people had found it normal, even psychologically necessary, to ignore the annoying Other. No longer. The substitute world that we had through our own passivity and inaction let metastasize around us began to fade out, bit by plasticine bit. And as it did so, we were regaining our innate propensity and talent for awareness of other human beings.
Inconveniently for the security state, this meant that it was no longer a simple matter to station strangers on street corners to watch us. The category of “legitimate nonparticipant” was not recognized by communities any more. Just as we now didn’t accept being under surveillance or being ‘covered’ by news organizations, we no longer tolerated outsiders being present when we gathered. “Join us—you’re more than welcome. Or leave.” That was now our message to every stranger who entered our neighborhood.
This was the hard fist hiding under the soft, pleasing fabric of our emerging, hyper-interactive civilization. Togetherness was what we now yearned for, togetherness and real belonging. And any aspect of modern life that detracted from this unity, no matter how indispensable it might have seemed before, began to be remorselessly eliminated.
Yet something was still lacking—that mysterious element that must be present for a citizen to join a demonstration or even to leap up and volunteer to man a barricade rather than retreat into the anonymous security of the crowd. That missing ingredient, it would turn out, was love.
For the moment, no matter how loud and enthusiastic the crowd, the inevitable conclusion of our mass marches was not a bang but a whimper. Rather than head for the nearest large public area and take the demonstration to the next level, at some point the people always broke up into their neighborhood teams and headed peacefully to their customary park or small square, where the dragons were waiting. One could almost hear the sigh of relief from the police and the political leadership. Later they were to find that their reaction was premature, to say the least.
14
The dragon songs continued to evolve. One could now hear songs that didn't fit in any traditional category. They weren’t social or political critiques, nor were they romantic or humorous in nature. They seemed to occupy a new and hybrid genre, one that was springing up in the strange, fertile space the dragons seemed to have opened up in our collective consciousness. The haunting “Thousand Eyes” is a good example:
The city has a thousand eyes
But none have
The busy street, the crowded bar,
And who is there for me?
It shares a certain speculative, meditative tone with the other songs being created at this time. Our marching style altered accordingly: the exuberant, bouncing rhythm gave way to a slower, more measured cadence. And we stopped clowning around during the march, drinking alcohol, passing around snacks, etc. We just took the whole thing more seriously.
It was noticed that elderly people seemed to participate in greater numbers when people were singing this type of song. And once they came out into the streets to join in, they stayed with us.
For a period of about six months the dragons themselves had a decidedly more marginal presence in the lyrics of the songs. It was as if we humans had things to work out amongst ourselves before we could return to them, before we could confront, clear-eyed and without distractions, these new and enigmatic additions to our world. And this seemed essential suddenly: that our view of them be as lucid and objective as possible. We had begun to feel that the dragons were somehow important. As imperceptibly as spring turns to summer, they had ceased being mere spectacles and curiosities of nature, alien creatures useful for the mild high they gave us. The dragons had become linked to us in a strange and unexpected way. And there were now those among us who believed that their coming had awakened a force