Alberto Gonzales has learned the hard way. Like many rag-to-riches people learn. When the gilded carriage stops for you, and the door creaks open, and you have never seen such heaven on earth… if only you will just ascend the steps….well, it’s best to pass it by.
Entering the gilded carriage is a bargain with the dark man, an elite game where the bettor never wins.
The now older but wiser Mr. Gonzales who danced so very hard to many other people’s music, perhaps wishes late at night … that he’d never left his once-sane life, and just said no thanks when the gilded carriage glided up to him on that lonely road…if only he’d just kept walking under his own power instead of agreeing to be carried like a pampered and protected jewel on a velvet cushion.
Yet, time out of mind, stepping into The Gilded Carriage and not realizing the driver of the carriage is Death, is the undoing of heroes and heroines in tales, as well as high aspiring, but unconscious, politicians, viziers, wizards, and would-be consigliore to kings in reality.
As I’ve studied the leitmotif of the “Carriage of Death,’ in mythos and tales over these years, the conveyance that ‘tricks’ the humble traveler into becoming too proud, appears as a sumptuous one… the gilded carriage promises in some way to give ease to the weary and dusty traveler who feels so lucky to hitch a ride.
But the other occupant inside the carriage, or driving the carriage, though often bedecked in fine linens and jewels of authority, is none other than Death come to quickly, or else slowly, destroy the foolish rider who took Death’s invitation without foresight.
To enter the gilded carriage unaware, means the latest riders will not be taken to glory, but down to their graves if they dont find a way to disembark.
The Gilded Carriage figures prominently in my exegesis on the old tale, “The Red Shoes†in Women Who Run With the Wolves. “The Red Shoes” unfolds as a story of… a person’s curiosity at first, which quickly turns into an obsession and finally into a reaching for power that then spins completely out of control.
Putting on ‘the red shoes’ makes the person in the tale go mad. Though Mr. Gonzales may have started his tenure in black wing tips, somewhere along the way, he seems to have entered the gilded carriage, and by the end, the shoes he was wearing were red, red, red… red as the sun. And he, like the child in the tale, could not stop dancing. Until others stopped him.
In the old story of, “The Red Shoes,” an impoverished and ragged little child has made handmade shoes for herself. The shoes are humble, creative, serviceable, beautiful in their own way. And the child treks in her handmade shoes through the forest from home to market, and back again.
One day, a gilded carriage draws up beside her and stops. The carved golden door opens of its own accord. Inside is an old woman dressed in finery. The crone offers the child a ride…
This is the part, that were it a film for children who knew the story, the children in the theatre would cry out, “Don’t get in! Don’t get in!”
But, the child, dazzled by the wealth and accommodation inside the carriage, and the offer of friendship from on high,
cannot hear her own conscience, her own instincts of self-preservation. So overwhelmed is she by the opportunity… without consideration, she scrambles up into the carriage.
The old woman takes the child home and makes a pet of her, combing and grooming and putting her in stiff little dresses and teaching her to sit and stand and walk equal to the old woman’s station.
Yet, the first thing the old woman had done to deform the child to conform to the old woman’s wishes, was to take away the child’s hand-made shoes, the ones that fit the child’s feet perfectly, a perfect fit for her gait, for her feeling the ground beneath her soles.
As the story rolls on, the child becomes enamoured of a pair of shiny red shoes in a shop window. Once she finagles to put them on, the shoemaker taps the bottom of her soles… and she begins to dance.
Dance she does, dance and dance and dance. Oh what a joy, oh how free the child feels. Until the next day. She is still dancing. In fact, she finds she cannot stop dancing.
And worse, she does not dance her own dance; for these are not her own shoes truly. She more and more furiously dances everyone else’s dance, to everyone else’s music.
Thus, the child dances out the door, down the road. The child dances madly into the forest, and then deeper into the haunted wood.
Day and night she dances like a crazy thing without cease. No matter how exhausted she becomes, she does the gavotte, the csardas, the waltz while partnered with wisps and ghosts.
Long funeral processions come into the girl’s sight. But she cannot join the mourners…. nor the many celebrants of feasts along the road… for her red shoes possess her, the enormity of the red shoes, her obsession with them… the red shoes are her masters, they are her guides to going lost, they alone create her distorted reality…. these red shoes that she cherished and desired so much, are not seven league boots; they are Death shoes instead .
But, she cannot get them off her feet. She is trapped in the alluring red shoes. Easier to go forward than back. Still, the torment; what she is required to do, bend this way and that in order to fast dance til she can no longer remember her original shape. She has become captive of, and toady to, the red shoes.
And still she dances like a wounded toy, dances, dancing past the churches, crying out for help; dancing past the procession and the farmers in the fields, dancing past the soldiers of the king, calling all the while, Help! Help! But, dancing, dancing, fatigued beyond fatigue and hanging like a coat swinging on a stick atop those red, red shoes.
Finally the child dances past a party of woodcutters and begs them to cut off her shoes. The men try to drag the red shoes off her bloody feet, but the shoes are stuck fast. And thus one woodcutter raises his axe and brings it down across her ankles, severing her feet from her body.
And the red shoes with her feet in them, keep dancing, madly dancing… the red shoes with the child’s feet in them, keep dancing off into the hills and down along the rivers, dancing, dancing… and the old people say that those red shoes with the feet in them, are still dancing yet…
…for there is a hidden hunger in some humans, not their best appetite, but an insatiable thing that hopes to gain a ride, to be carried, not by one’s own hand-made life, but by one gilded in advance… to be chosen by and enjoin the lofty. And too often, the too soon empty.
In the story, the child who had such inventive and creative promise, is crippled now, and goes her sadder way, begging what is needed to stay alive.
And, Alberto Gonzales; whether the red shoes were too big for him, too fast for him, or controlled by others via unseen means, whether he wore them willingly, or suddenly woke with these as requirement of his office… someone tapped on the soles of his shoes, and thus he began to dance. Eventually danced crazy and out of control. No limits. Dancing into hearings, dancing around the topics, dancing around direct answers, dancing like his life depended on it; dancing and dancing.
Mr. Gonzales, like the child in the tale, is, in reality, a boy from nowhere he says. Those of us from poor beginnings are often all the more vulnerable to gilded carriages then, that’s for sure. For Mr. Bush to choose a Latino boy from poor beginnings, means extra loyalty from that boy, and more importantly, an ever grateful ally. The operative word; the operative glue of loyalty: Gratitude.
There is often in those who come from nothing, a perpetual wonder that we are suddenly allowed to be in the presence of those who claim to breathe rarified air. Such ought be our first warning sign that we are about to lose our wits and be exploited. But, more often being invited into the sanctum sanctorum can seem such a wondrous step away from our history of our ancestors and parents having no access, and being closed out. All the more reason to be wary when sudden gold is offered on wheels.
So, Mr. Gonzales, like many, stepped into the gilt conveyance willingly, gladly, likely at first seduced by all the trim and fit… and especially, by being able to be unlike his father, unlike his mother, being able to ride instead of walk weary on that dusty road.
Fairy tales have such irony. Mr. Gonzales’ feet were severed by those he severed. Those persons who raised the ‘hew’ and cry, along with Senate committees; together they all hoisted the axe… and though it was not a clean cut, but a severance from a hundred cuts…. it is done at last.
It is appalling that public service too often means having to sacrifice one’s humanity in order to logroll and position oneself to attempt to evermore be ‘king of the dirt pile’ with more and more grabbing of resources, more and more funneling of lucre, more and more power say-so, not with, but over others.
Yet, as at the end of many mythic tales, Mr. Gonzales, enchantment broken for now, has a chance to return to ordinary human form; if he can find where the old king hid his handmade shoes. He can start to build a hand-made life again, one that he can remember himself in, rather than lose himself through… at the request and demand of others, as well as by the sights of his least formed self.
‘The symbolic quit’ of Mr. Bush’s many allies, has given all of them the same chance… to walk their own roads, hand-make their own lives again, dance their own dances without ghost choreographers… Today, Mr. Gonzales, like others who have fallen from or been thrown under The Gilt Carriage’s wheels, could find their ways back to being ser humano, a true human being again.
Too, Mr. Gonzales’ resignation may have saved himself in the nick of time from a real deal-breaker with God. Another irony? As reported by Dan Kennedy, at the Guardian,
“Alberto Gonzales, the ethically-challenged US attorney general, was on the verge of having the power of life and death bestowed upon him.
“Thanks to a little-known provision in the Patriot Act, [State’s] executions would be speeded up, and the attorney general would usurp the right of judges to determine if states are providing competent lawyers to defendants charged with capital crimes…
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dan_kennedy/2007/08/alberto_gonzales_angel_of_deat.html
Mr. Gonzales’ resignation may have saved him from not an imatatio Cristi, but from acting as a Torqemada… pretending to be God. He will now not have the power to, nor think he ought, in order to please the governing ghosts, have to seize life and death over others. His resignation may have ultimately saved him from La carreta del muerto…
…from our own Latino folklore… La carreta del muerto is a story about an ancient wooden cart that pulls up even with us one night on a lonely road. Inside the cart is an odd and otherworldly stranger with a bow and arrows. The stranger beckons us to join them, by making us believe that they can make us feel everything, and nothing, whenever we wish.
But, one step into that cart, and though for a time we think we too may have governance over Life and Death itself… we become fat with inflation then, our necks disappear into our chests which are puffed out with pomp… and that’s the anesthesia
… We next glide around in arrogance in the carreta del muerto, The Cart of Death, all without fully realizing for a time– and then realizing too late– that the most precious life we have, that of the core self which allows us to feel and act on tenderness, hope and love of humanity and the desire to shelter the life force… that that core self, is the odd and otherworldly stranger’s only target for destruction. And thus anesthetized by privilege, we now through collusion and loss of soul, cannot resist receiving the death blow.
We have choices.
We don’t know what Mr. Gonzales will choose. If I were asked, I’d say, listen to the counsel of your wife, Mrs. Gonzales, who has surely missed the man she married. I think she’d know through womanly intuition where the handmade shoes are hidden.
On the other hand, the red shoes with the feet in them are still alive and dancing crazily over hills and down to the rivers in our world… Some say severed limbs can be re-attached.
CODA
The artwork of the carriage, is called “Careta,” and is by Marina Ludanova, a talented digital artist whose website of her work is here: http://www.artstudia.us