Most early societies identified solar and lunar influences on personality, society, and the world at large. In watching the Vice-Presidential candidate debate last night, I thought about this aspect of the election.
Solar influences are clearly defined, solid, forthright. They are based on courageous actions undertaken for simple clear outcomes. The sun is active, energetic, supports growth and health. At an extreme, the Solar influences become "too much of a good thing"; i.e. too much aggresion, too much simplification, too much heat. The solar approach takes and gives in clear measure, builds and demolishes in direct proportion to goals.
Lunar influences are soft, shaded, unclear. They are veiled, diaphanous, seductive. Lunar influences act by indirection, suggestion, seduction. They insinuate and imply rather than state clearly. They "network" and entangle, operate in a world where the brightest light isn't much lighter than the shadows. Lunar influences are emotional, appealing to our deepest fears about the security of our homes and health, our loved ones and our fortunes. They also seduce, with hints of passion and longing.
Obviously, no campaign has a lock on either quality. Kerry is becoming more complex and indirect as the campaign progresses, even as he successfully counters charges that he is a "flip-flopper." Bush and Cheney tell us they are strong and solar, but their entanglements in Iraq are very lunar indeed. Edwards is blunt in confronting Cheney about the Administration's lapse in judgment, but becomes vague and suggestive when challenged to state his qualifications for the job of vice president.
The more I considered the situation and the quality of the debates, the more I realized that I was really looking for some sunlight in this election. And it feels as though the sun has set, leaving us all in a Midsummer Night's Dream of illusion, role-playing, hidden craft and manipulative arts.
Edwards is convincing. The old word for putting a spell on someone is to "glamor" them, and Edwards' charm has that quality of glamoring the moment. Kerry is as gaunt and angular as a Giacometti sculpture of Don Quixote. He seems to be wasting away from within, as though he carried a burden too dark and too ancient to be brought into the light of day. The word for Kerry is "Sepulchral": a sepulchre is a monument in a cemetary. Kerry speaks from the grave of innocent young men, in the voice grown dark, dank and hollow with unmeted justices, unbounded sorrows, untellable truths. He is like the ghost of Christmas Past, trying to hold Scrooge accountable for the misdeeds of history. But he doesn't have a clear, sunlit image of the future. He speaks from the memory of a better America, but his plans for dealing with the complex morass of Health Care, Social Security, cities and foreign relations lack a sense of muscular competence. He rides a Harley Davidson, more like a Ring Wraith than a daylit man.
Bush is Bottom...a man with the head of an Ass. When he tries to speak he brays. His idea of persuading people is to assert in loud simple hee-haws, and trust repetition to make up for an absence of reality. Bush is a master of the insider game, speaking to the converted in signals and signs, while using simple scorn to keep the outsiders at bay.
Which leaves Cheney.
Cheney is a solar man who made a pact with the moon, and is visibly showing signs of regretting it. At some point in his life, Cheney developed the capacity for action, for making clear distinctions, for establishing sides and keeping action focussed on taking clear goals. But it didn't get him what he wanted.
He succumbed to a siren in some passage between waters, on some journey that he cannot end. He is a solar man whose sun has abandoned him, leaving him tense and writhing in the lairs of the moon boys and wraiths. He cannot completely leave his lights behind, but his heart is not completely in the shadow play of his cronies.
I didn't know this about him before. But it was written in the blanks where his loyalty to Bush should have been last night, in the effort that was visible as he tried to assert the party line on Hussein one more time. And the Lunar mask fell off completely when the subject of his daughter was broached. He was speechless. He was a father with a strong solar love of his own who could not grovel and pirouette one more time for the damp toads that employed him.
He gathered his cues for one more straight arm in the mush of Edwards before the curtain came down. But it is interesting that the locution that became his verbal logo for the evening was "stand up." He said over and over that we had to "stand up" a strong government in Afghansitan and Iraq, "stand up" free elections, in the rubble of the prey we ran to ground. In his lunar trance he neglected to realize that to be "stood up" means to be abandoned by one's date. And at the end of the dance, Cheney was a solar man in the shadows, alone more than any of the others, too far from his own origins and his own lights to be known.
I felt saddened by this. I never thought I would have a shred of feeling for Cheney, or men like Cheney, who had sold their masculine birthright for the mess of pottage that politics calls "power". But something happened last night that changed that.
If we could figure out what went wrong with Cheney, we could know some part of ourselves that has gone so wrong, so far wrong. He could have been a contender. But he has become a palooka with a sneer and a patchwork heart, boxing in the shadows. No one did it to him. Why would anyone do this to themselves?
Why would any nation do what we have done, to ourselves? That is the question, and no debate moderator is going to ask it. So I ask it, of you and me. Why?
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