Dragons in the Senate

Dragons or Wiglaf and Beowulf?

 In yesterday’s post, I talked about how current gridlock in the U. S. Senate reminds me of the intractable problems that confront King Hrothgar in Beowulf.  Grendel, I said, is the spirit of fratricidal rage that sets colleagues against each other and brings activity in the great hall of Heorot to a halt.  Upon further reflection, however, I decided that the monster that has invaded the Senate is not Grendel, who is a young man’s monster. Rather, it is the dragon.

The dragon shows up at the end of Beowulf’s long and successful reign as king of the Geats.  At first he does not take the threat seriously, and there is reason for this.  He himself is the dragon.

Or rather, he has dragon traits that threaten to come to the fore.  Beowulf has had a long and successful reign, but he has become too focused on himself.  In the final third of the poem, we see him lost in the past, not working to ensure the future of his people.  He has given birth to no children nor designated a successor.  He likes to hog the microphone and insists on fighting the dragon all by himself.  His disempowering leadership style means that all his men except Wiglaf scatter when the battle begins to go badly.

The dragon does what neither Grendel nor Grendel’s mother could do: it burns down the king’s hall (in other words, the very core of the society is at risk) and, ultimately, it kills Beowulf.  The future looks grim, with Wiglaf predicting that the Geats will be overrun by the Franks, the Frisians or the Swedes.  His prediction comes true: who has heard of the Geats?

Do the parallels work?  While the world warms up and unemployment and deficits soar, Senators fire barbs at each other.   The effects of dragon poison on Beowulf may be an all too apt description of the current corrosive atmosphere in Congress in which past grievances eat away at collegiality :

                                    Then the wound
dealt by the ground-burner earlier began
to scald and swell; Beowulf discovered
deadly poison suppurating inside him,
surges of nausea . . .

The rest of the world, meanwhile, is not standing still.  Many are saying that our empire is on the decline and are predicting that the Chinese, not the United States, will own the 21st century.  Actually, in a recent column economist Paul Krugman says we are less like Rome than 18th century Poland, whose legislature was so locked in stasis (unanimous consensus was required) that the country was unable to meet its challenges.  Poland’s history in the 19th and 20th centuries has not been pretty.

Before we depress ourselves too much, however, note that Beowulf does manage to kill the dragon in the end.  Put another way, his kingly side wins out over his dragon side.  He just can’t do it alone.

The victory comes because two men decide to work together.  Beowulf may initially have wanted to go it alone and claim all the credit for himself (what political party doesn’t?), but Wiglaf disregards his instructions and comes to his aid anyway.  Beowulf at that point accepts his help and the two together slay the beast.

Once they do so, the immense potential of the dragon’s wealth, which has been locked in its calcified grip, is freed up.  Here’s how the moment is described:

And so, I have heard, the son of Weohstan [Wiglaf]
quickly obeyed the command of his languishing
war-weary lord; he went in his chain-mail
under the rock-piled roof of the barrow,
exulting in his triumph, and saw beyond the seat
a treasure-trove of astonishing richness,
wall-hangings that were a wonder to behold,
glittering gold spread across the ground,
the old dawn-scorching serpent’s den
packed with goblet and vessels from the past
tarnished and corroding. 

Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch O’Connell as Beowulf and Wiglaf?  Before you laugh, think of how the passage of time now casts a kind of legendary glow over the collaboration between Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill in the 1980’s.

I should note that Beowulf’s happy ending is qualified by an irony.  Even though Beowulf goes out a hero, there is still no future for the Geats.  The wealth is buried with him, a monument to the past.  

So are our best days behind us? Is the Senate just a mausoleum commemorating America’s past glory?

Or is  America still a land of astonishing wealth and immense potential?  I believe that if majority party and minority party can work together to release the dragon’s hold on us, our future remains limitless.  Reagan’s “morning in America,” Obama’s “yes we can,” all are possible. 

But such a future depends on our working together.  Will the kingly side of the Senate step forward?  If not, the dragon wins.