Baron Wormser: The Wand

Like many born in the years after World War Two, I spent a portion of my childhood watching Disney cartoons on television and in the movie theater. One thrilling aspect to me was the magic wand wielded by Tinkerbelle and Mickey Mouse. With a magic wand you could do anything – a powerful inspiration to a typically powerless child. You could undo bad doings. You could make wishes come true. You could put people to sleep and wake them up. Glued to the small or large screen, I felt that magic was real. Why not? The wand felt all the more compelling because life clearly lacked such wands. My mother may have waved a fork in exasperation at whatever cooking difficulty she was encountering but nothing magical occurred. A tough pot roast remained a tough pot roast. Still, I carried the wand within me. I must have dreamed about it. Wands were like that. 

   Walt Disney, as the bearer of fairy tales to American children, had a strong sense of the need for fables that both affirmed and protected innocence. Evil might threaten but never won out. Magical aid was just a wrist shake away. Children, to be sure, did not want to learn about the relentless chains of circumstances, so often unhappy (and worse than unhappy), that constituted what was called “history.” The wand offered freedom from circumstantial outcomes, particularly for those who believed in the magic. Anything could be happening around the child looking at Tinkerbelle, more often than not a parental argument, but the sound and fury did not matter as long as the child was safe in the fairy tale world. Could a child live there? Certainly many of the characters seemed to enjoy a perennial childhood, never growing old and always triumphing over malign plots. Some children had Jesus; some had Disney. Quite a few had both. 

   It’s not a big jump to the United States in 2024 and the coming to life in the confidence-man form of Donald Trump – sower of discord, adept in the ways of vilification, felon, liar – of the wish for a magic wand. He was, after all, a creature of television who was featured in a show where someone would get a boon at the show’s end, someone whom he chose after dismissing everyone else – all those Cinderellas who would not make it to the corporate ball. Apparently, some magical, all-knowing power resided in Trump. I was not about to gainsay Tinkerbelle or Mickey Mouse and many have seen no cause to gainsay Trump. If television proposes a reality then it is a reality, no matter how concocted the reality is. Given the nonstop nature of television shows, a person could think that reality exists to be concocted and that the historical is an irrelevance, something summoned up by the less imaginative who are envious of what the custodian of the wand can accomplish. As to history, I think of Adam Smith who wrote of the invisible hand of the free market. Invisible hand? Isn’t that a fairy tale? But no, many adults are glad to believe it as an article of something like faith. Such invisibility makes commerce all the more stimulating and ostensibly banishes chicanery. Like magic wands, metaphors have unique power.

   Despite all that Americans have materially, a gnawing feeling persists in the Land of the Pursuit of Happiness of serious unhappiness. How could that be? Who betrayed American innocence, the belief in the utter goodness of the United States, a nation especially blessed by none other than God? You don’t have to search far for the answer. Pirates did it. No, not those guys (and a few gals) who sailed the seas (and still are sailing in some parts of the world). I mean pirates as in desperadoes, as in Venezuelan rapists taking over towns, immigrants who are illegal and refuse to go home, liberals who want to foist unwieldy nomenclature on decently grammatical people. And then there are the consumers of pets. Anything can happen in a tale that makes fear palpable.

   “Save us and protect us” – the plea has tended over the centuries to be religious but in a secular age (see Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age) temporal actuality, via television and the Internet, comes cheap. Eternity can wait, which, after all, is what eternity does anyway. Here and now, the answers lie in waving the wand of castigation. Someone has to walk the plank. Someone has to be consigned to the brig. That is to say, mentally – or sometimes, not mentally. Best of all, someone has to abolish history and say the past doesn’t matter as Henry Ford, a very representative American, once insisted when he said, “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.” So damn the chains of circumstances and praise ignorance of them. What time do busy people have for any question beginning with “Why?” Especially when people are busy making more of whatever they are making, beginning but not ending with money. 

   The present sells. Novelty sells. Invention sells. Progress sells. The history we are making sells, even if we don’t recognize it as history. A showman to his core, Trump has something to sell – greatness. He does use the cloak of the past – “again” – but the cloak is meaningless. No one can pin down when that was. Who cares? It’s the notion that is everything, the wand that is being waved that makes people feel better even if the gnawing unhappiness represented by depression, abuse, drug use, financial instability, free-floating anxiety, and more than a dash of mass psychosis is not letting up. We have to be better now, don’t we, than those poor losers (to use a favorite Trump word) back there in the past? Yet somehow those losers were great. Artfully or not artfully at all, the wand abolishes all the complications and contradictions that are the stuff of adulthood. Belief is like that. Magical stuff. 

   Disney understood and Trump understands what drives a sizable portion of the nation and how irrelevant matters of character and intelligence are in the realm of American politics. The Puritan Separatists whom de Tocqueville pointed to as the spiritual progenitors of the American endeavor writhed under the minatory finger of uncertainty – saved or damned, that was the question. You have to give them credit, however, in that they recognized the greatness of their terrible yet merciful God. He deserved that adjective. Although the native people whom the Puritans feared did not go in for drastic grandiloquence, they respected and honored the great powers that resided in the Earth. Their mores spoke to the ways of the Earth and of ancestors (the “tradition” Ford had no use for) rather than the monotheistic urge. If one prefers the visible to the invisible, one has to say they were saner and wiser. The invisible can shade off into sheer unbalanced weirdness: witch trials, inquisitions, mass murders of heretics of one stripe or another – the insanity of ideology. 

   When adroitly waved, however, the wand can control the invisible. After all, even that invisible hand has to be strategically managed according to quarterly earnings. Still, too much strategy does no one any good. We feel life on our pulses and we want to yell with others about what we feel. Or some of us do. We want to be rallied from the doldrums of mere earning and consuming. Most of the food is bland, unhealthy, and fast. The water doesn’t taste good. The air is full of smoke on too many days. Every key stroke and movement is being tracked. Impossible desires are routinely offered as possible. The most important people are not teachers and nurses but billionaires. Prices outstrip wages. Should I go on? Consciously or unconsciously, many find this situation demoralizing, have gravitated to some cut-rate, I-can-fix-it demagoguery, and voted accordingly, especially since the other party has offered little that is emotionally compelling. Voting asks nothing of anyone and if the fixing comes at some unknown person’s expense, well what of it? 

   The what-of-it unfortunately brings up not only matters such as nuclear weapons and environmental devastation but the civility that a society depends on to remain a society rather than an agglomeration of aggrieved individuals, more than a few of whom have small arsenals at their disposal. Many Americans are uniquely tied to their wishes because they believe in the endless power of the individual will, even while some of them benefit from inherited wealth and position and spend their lives in corporate enterprises. The American will is formed in the comprehensive wish that anything can happen here and that everything can be made into a right. Everyone gets a wand, though it becomes plain in the course of living that some have stronger wands than others and that the whole notion of the wand is, as Ford would have it, “more or less bunk.” No matter. Whatever the tradition is (and now, given artificial intelligence, the “human” is a tradition), it should be disrupted, since it doesn’t honor the power, however cockamamie, of what should be, particularly a should-be based on what never was. More unimpeded power to it then, especially when it is concentrated in one mere man who has insisted,duce-like, on the executive power of his wand. 

Baron Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000 he was writer in residence at the University of South Dakota. Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar. For a list of his books, please click here.

Copyright 2024 Baron Wormser