I was born in the Year of the Dragon—the Fire Dragon, to be specific, so if you’re into all that, I’ll let you do the math. I don’t really believe in the Chinese Zodiac; I think the universe is a lot more specific and personal than that, but it’s an interesting thought experiment as far as it goes. I do concur that when I read a description of Dragon1, I certainly see me. And the Year of the Dragon is supposed to be, shall we say, dynamic. This happens to ring true to my “lived experience.”
“Dynamic” it has been. For example, A LOT happened in the year of my birth—it’s one of those years that you get used to hearing about in historical contexts. Again, in Y.O.T.D. 2012, I don’t know about y’all, but I can count that as one of the most dynamic years of my life, culminating in a December car accident that changed my course completely—and is the reason I’m a novelist today, and no longer a touring musician.
As we came through last year’s Year of the Rabbit (Rabbits tend to be “neurotic if they dwell on their emotions”…I mean, I didn’t make that up), we saw a decent expression of that in the berzerker October attack on Israel and the subsequent global protests. These events were nothing if not neurotic…and they continue to show all the signs of an uncontrolled mass neurotic disorder. As they say, these folks are “all up in their feelings.”
But now we’re in Dragon. Wood Dragon, to be specific. So, if I believed in all of this, what would that mean?
Well, let me start by saying that I’m not worrying about offending the god of Tai Sui or anything, because “greater is He that is in me.” And when I look at the predictions for me personally, I’m truly unmoved. I haven’t looked at a horoscope since I was a wicca-practicing-astral-projecting-hare-krishna-dancing wayward youth, and have no plans to re-start living by that paradigm.
But the lens through which we see the world matters. And there are different lenses to choose from. A New Age lens will yield one set of outcomes; a Judeo-Christian lens something different; a neo-Marxist Critical lens will yield another. This is indisputable. It’s just the way it is. Which one you prefer isn’t the point, but you should follow these things to their logical conclusions before signing on. And you should know that some lenses are in conflict with each other.
I will demystify something for you right now. If you find yourself confused and frustrated by how Western college students (most notably affluent and yet not widely-traveled ones—I’m amazed by how little this generation travels) are finding common cause with the Iranian Ayatollah, the Houthi pirates and Hamas tunnel-digging terrorists, it is because they do not see the world through a Judeo-Christian lens, but through a Critical one. That’s it. They truly do believe in the Hegelian notion of a moral “right side of history” (something that doesn’t exist as such in the Judeo-Christian worldview) and they believe that they are on that right side of history.
The activists looking through this Critical lens may believe in many contradictory things, it’s true. But though for the majority of them, this is likely more a result of long-term lazy scrolling than deep thought or wide reading, the patchwork nature of the issues is permissible when seeing through the Critical lens.
Like a pair of solar eclipse glasses, the Critical lens shrinks all contrast into a diminished view that—though it preaches multiple identity distinctions—ultimately dims all people and their motivations into even less than a binary, and the whole brilliant world becomes cast not into black and white, but into shadow: issues of family, religious community, climate, sex, everything is lumped together. This is how someone can simultaneously believe in “Qu*ers for Palestine” and that the “Jews are the new N*zis”…or whatever they’ve been told is the issue or slogan du jour (and we’ve seen since 2014-ish that it’s a growing list). Activists of this sort can just absorb the next cause into the shadow as it threatens to cover the Sun.
Those seeing through the other, Judeo-Christian lens, however (regardless of their actual conscious belief), are increasingly finding their palette and spectrum widening. For them, the Dragon-dynamism of the current times is scary, yes, but exciting. Re-enchantment is the word of the 2020s, you may have noticed. The possibilities for collaboration, the friendships, the creativity, the celebration of life—everything is coming into Technicolor.
As depressed as I became after the events of October 7—and that was one of half a dozen major life events I’m still dealing with—I realized I had a choice of which lens to look through. The lens I have been seeing through for over 30 years is already the one that is resplendent with color and variation, with potential and discovery. And those damn paragliders and their mouthpieces want me to sell that for a bowl of grey pottage?
Je refuse.
OK, OK. We’re being pushed into “choosing a side.” I have resisted this my whole life. I am no joiner. BUT. I hope you are beginning to see by now that the “sides” or “teams” have nothing, NOTHING to do with left or right, blue or red, conservative or progressive, far-this or far-that. That is all bullshit. Don’t get distracted.
The “teams”, such as they are, are this: Team Color or Team Grey. Team Flat or Team Dimension. Team Life or Team Death.
It is this conflict that has escorted us into the dynamic year of the Dragon. Put on your glasses with these lenses, and you will better understand what we are dealing with, and you may feel more comfortable making your choice, because it’s not a limiting choice, but a freeing one.
The teams are this: Team Color or Team Grey.
Team Flat or Team Dimension. Team Life or Team Death.
A Dynamic-Dragon way of seeing the world allows you to put aside how you think the world should work, and get real about the way it is. The Book of Ecclesiastes (or The Byrds, take your pick) has been clear about this for thousands of years: there is a time for everything. Peace, yes, we all want peace—but sometimes there is a time for war, and this is it. I’m sorry, but it’s true. With a kid in the Marines, there’s nothing I want less than war. But no one is asking for my foreign policy advice.
Jeremy England, writing for Tablet magazine, recently had a very, very interesting and provocative article entitled “Live by the Law or Die on the Cross,” in which he argues that Israel needs to stop abiding by the inherently Christian paradigm of the West—things like “turn the other cheek”, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”, etc.—which he says are unrealistic in its tribe-based neighborhood, and reclaim its own Jewish moral framework. He writes:
“Israel must stop begging to be judged fairly by whatever standards the current hegemon has decreed we all agree upon. We need to look for standards from within our tradition to set a moral example for the whole world, while making it more practically possible to defend our homeland.”
I do not agree with his assessment of the Christian tradition, which is as diverse on the subject of war, nationhood, and individual vs. collective moral action as Judaism is. With fairness to my Jewish family and friends, I think there’s a huge misconception that Christianity2 is monolithic and lacks the beautiful and often contentious internal debate that exists within the Talmudic discussion and its antecedents. It’s not possible for a third of the world’s population—most of whom are not Western, American, Caucasian, or Evangelical—to agree on anything, let alone to submit, cult-like, to the kind of hegemon Jeremy England invokes here.
But he’s a realist, and his deeper point is really valid: whatever you want to call this entity that we live in—“The West”, “Christendom”, whatever—the modern, post-Enlightenment, post-World-War-II world has certain expectations that we take for granted, but rarely examine.
Do people displaced by war, after which new national boundaries have been drawn, have a right to expect that their great-grandparents’ house key should still turn a lock and let them in? (Tell that to the German Jews.) Do all cultural expressions deserve a seat at the table for consideration? Do civilian deaths in a war their government instigated count as a “gen*cide”? And on and on. Read the article. Again, I may or may not agree with his assessments, but they certainly provoked me to think.
The reason we’re all being driven to madness by the “other side” of whatever issue we’re looking at is because we keep expecting that we all think the same and we are literally, the truth is, living in two divergent realities which cannot converge. Ever. The distance between them will only continue to expand. Hence the increasing velocity of the chaos, the blinding clashes of color, the frenetic anger, the doomsday tantrum of it all.
Understand, then, that this is the wild dance of the Dragon, with all the frantic Rabbits scampering about underfoot, and you understand everything.
It’s vital that we commit to knowing the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. Then you can make yourself a cup of chamomile tea, take a deep breath, and thank God that whatever else you can say about our times, at least you’ll never be bored.
For example, this nails it:
Best careers for Dragons
Artist
Politician
Academic Researcher
Architect
Entrepreneur
Worst careers for Dragons
Soldier
Mechanic
Office Worker
Customer Support
IT
I would remind all of us that Christianity is, at its heart, one of only two twin “Judaisms” (to borrow from historian Daniel Boyarin) to survive the Roman destruction of the Jewish nation in 134 AD. If you look very carefully at the early writings through that lens (speaking of lenses), you will see that the midrashic nature of both the Rabbinic writings and the earlies Church Fathers (including Saul-Paul), have very similar ways of reasoning and tossing ideas around. I reject completely and vehemently any notion that Christians are the “new Israel” or that God has reneged on or abrogated His original covenant with the literal people of Israel. I promise you that seeing things this way is much more interesting, life-giving, and fertile for mutual understanding.
Very insightful as always. There’s a lot of wisdom to resisting the monolith narrative that the mass media and social media produces- over simplifying the matter to labels and dishonoring complexity and nuance has contributed to emotionalism getting the best of some of us. I’ve been meditating on the “slow to speak, slow to anger and quick to listen” wisdom of James. I’ll be the first to admit my ignorance of the deep and ancient roots of foreign ‘policy’ but as you mentioned before the historical rhythms play out and I am wondering if it really is that society/ people don’t learn from the past or is it a fault in the collective to be easily steered towards complacent. -AND isn’t this the time when the artists show up and start sounding the trumpet for us to pay attention and start re-examining ourselves and how our thinking is either as you mentioned life or death.