The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [511]
`Humanity is one. Each of us is responsible for his personal actions and his actions towards the rest of humanity. All we can do is hold back our own brand from the fire. Pull it back, do not add to the flame.'
As crowds emerged from watching The Lord of the Rings in the first years of the twenty-first century, they might have felt just as mysteriously elevated by the immense drama they had just witnessed as their predecessors emerging from a theatre in sixteenth century London or Athens of the fifth century BC, or an audience hearing of the battle between Gilgamesh and Humbaba in some city of ancient Mespotamia; even though, outwardly, the world they emerged into seemed so unrecognisably different. But what they would then also have found was that this world was itself now acting out its own version of the cosmic drama they had just been following; except that it was by no means so clear where the powers of darkness and light lay.
When on 11 September 2001 images flashed round the globe of the airliners crashing into the towers of New York's World Trade Center, the single most shocking event since the Kennedy assassination, mankind was drawn into a conflict which could only be properly understood by recognising the extent to which all the different players were projecting onto it their own versions of precisely those same archetypes which shape storytelling.
From the point of view of George W. Bush, he was involved in a battle with the supreme embodiment of evil: that many-headed monster of global terrorism which initially centred on the invisible figure of Osama bin Laden, lurking like the bearded Saruman in his cave. But it then appeared that bin Laden, like Saruman, was only a front for an even more deadly figure of evil. Now Sauron himself could be seen casting his threatening shadow over the world, from the centre of his dark empire in Baghdad.
For Bush and his allies, a good part of the power of the archetypal narrative now calling them to action was the memory of how his father had failed to press his earlier bid to overcome Saddam Hussein to its proper archetypal conclusion. In 1991, after the heroes had set out, like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to travel half across the world to slay the monster, they had at the last minute stayed their hand, leaving the monster untouched. Now Bush the son set out to complete his father's story. When in 2003 his forces had won their brilliant military victory, and Saddam was finally pulled like a shrivelled monster from his hole in the ground, it might have seemed the tale was finally over.
But already it was apparent that the plot was not quite so simple. This was to become even more obvious when it emerged just how far Bush and his faithful companion Tony Blair had, in projecting onto Saddam rather more power to threaten the world than reality justified, been emulating Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, launching a ferocious assault on giants and discovering them to be only windmills.
From another point of view, of course, it was not Saddam who was the monster of the story at all. For many this archetype was now projected on America and Bush himself, representing that ruling consciousness which, from `above the line', cannot see the truth of what is going on in the shadows cast by its egocentric power. The United States was now the one undisputed global superpower, in a way the world had never seen before. But `below the line, in the world of Islam, in Europe, in the awakening giant of China, all sorts of forces were beginning to constellate in resentment