In Praise of The Alameda Dragon
On being a third thing
Protests against Trump’s militarized abuses of power continue to give us harrowing visuals and, within them, portraits of courage nationwide. Today I’d like to give one of these local champions her due: the wearer of the dragon-esque costume above. While some documentation shows her filming ICE and otherwise mixing it up on the front lines of an Alameda, CA, protest, what she’s given us in the above image (and on film, ca. 2:40 in this report) is a lesson in a different way to make an impact in the face of state-sponsored violence. Let us recognize a hero in our midst.
The genius of this captured moment is in two parts: the costume and the apparent inattention to the horrors surrounding her. Together they make for a double surprise: she’s a subject you don’t expect to see; and she’s directing her own attention away from the object you’d expect would hold it. It’s a great bit in the comedy school of incongruity.
In his essential study of the trickster figure, Lewis Hyde discusses the many traps the resourceful trickster exists to find a way out of, including the “trap of opposition”: when we’re fighting against something but have the sense of being in contradiction mode, stuck with the terms of engagement set by our opponents. The trickster’s escape from this is not another volley on either side but “some third thing,” e.g. humor. Hyde quotes art trickster Marcel Duchamp, who grew frustrated that his mode of critiquing French bourgeois society, Dadaism, “was a movement of negation and, by the very fact of its negation, turned itself into an appendage of the exact thing it was negating”—so he worked to “open up a corridor of humor that once led into dream-imagery and, consequently, into Surrealism.” Unexpected jokes led to new ideas, which led to creative progress.
We know Trump hates jokes at his expense; this whole nightmare allegedly started because he couldn’t chill out at the White House Correspondents’ dinner while being roasted for his obsession with then-President Obama’s birth certificate. But all the jokes in the world have been made about the administration’s incompetence and cruelty, and they so often seem like water off a duck’s back. The Dragon is the corridor of humor we need.
The Trump regime’s oxygen is attention and belief. A narcissist is only happy when everyone is looking at him, and autocracies become inevitable and entrenched only when everyone believes they are. The peak of insult (comedic or otherwise), is, then, to deny them the satisfaction of both, even for a moment. The best punchline may be a third thing: not everything is about you.
Look at our hero again. She’s going somewhere. She has a beverage. She’s on a vector to which this scene is tangential (even if in reality it’s a performance), and in making you wonder about her whole Rosencrantz and Guildenstern deal she breaks the ICE goons’ monopoly on action and significance.
There is, obviously, a massive place for direct, unflagging, angry protest against everything this administration says and does. In this image alone, there’s plenty of reason to focus on and be enraged by the main event: an unprovoked chemical assault, as a federal agent fired a pepper round into the face of local clergyman Rev. Jorge Bautista. But being contrarian means zagging where the opposition thinks we’ll zig, which means also welcoming more indirect forms of resistance.
Icons like the Portland Frogs, the NY polka-dot dress wearer, and the sandwich thrower are related heroes, doing the good work of bringing irreverence (whether through goofy costumes or radical mundanity) into the protest itself. But The Dragon, in this snapshot, is doing something distinct: she’s a comet across the sky of the whole thing. A spell breaker. Proof that there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in this administration’s stupid, narrow philosophy of conflict.
A whole article contextualizing this third thing as opposition isn’t entirely in the spirit, so to zag, here are some things I saw walking through downtown NYC on a recent evening. A square full of roller-blading Halloween costume wearers. A priest sitting on a church stoop in full black cassock, shooting the breeze with a passerby in the dark. The waft of incense from a combination florist and Santería shop. A baby rat. A sidewalk spread of lamps made from miniature plastic horses. All this was happening alongside everything else that’s happening. This easy plurality of public life is in danger, but it’s still here.
Be a third thing. Find a third thing and celebrate it. It is not retreat and it is not irrelevant; it is orthogonal, a piercing of the totalizing narrative veil with which this political regime seeks to smother civic life. Alameda Dragon, we salute you.
This is a cogent essay. I like the point about a tangent, the humor which draws our attention away from the obsessive-compulsive draw to the violence and injustice and terror. Thank you. But I think this is the most important take-away; "The Trump regime’s oxygen is attention and belief. A narcissist is only happy when everyone is looking at him, and autocracies become inevitable and entrenched only when everyone believes they are. The peak of insult (comedic or otherwise), is, then, to deny them the satisfaction of both, even for a moment. The best punchline may be a third thing: not everything is about you.
Yes, well-said! And add in Duchamp, and not one but two Hamlet allusions! Well-done!