Wicked

Saw Wicked last night at the Kennedy Center with -- what else -- a bunch of Wiccans. I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, but I enjoyed it. Based on the book of the same name, it tells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, from her point of view. It's also, I think, an interesting story about friendship and how our friends change us. While the song I downloaded to my iPod last night after the show was "Defying Gravity," the song I woke up humming this morning was the duet that Elphaba and Glinda the Good Witch sing to each other and say, "Who knows if I've been changed for the better, but thanks to you, I have been changed for good." That's what happens when we make friends; they change us.

This ties in as well with another topic I've been thinking about lately -- fear. Shirely MacLaine said that the more she traveled, the more she realized that "fear makes strangers of people who should be friends." At first glance, Glinda -- who's lovely, and popular, and perky -- and Elphaba -- who's green, and outcast, and way too self-consciously serious -- seem like odd friends. And, yet, when they're able to get past their fears, they do become friends.

And, I think of how the fear that Bush has generated has depleted the friendship that the rest of the world felt for us just after 9/11. Clinton was, if anything, more popular outside, as opposed to inside, the U.S. But he didn't make other peoples objects of fear in an attempt to influence U.S. politics, then, did he? Irrational fear of Islam and brown people has made strangers of people who could have been and should have been our friends.

Fear also, as the Bene Gesserit noted, is the mind killer. When you're afraid of someone, you can't put yourself in their shoes and imagine why they're acting the way they are. You make up stupid excuses such as, "They hate us for our freedom," and then you act based upon your false premise. Bush and his rubes and dupes are so busy telling themselves scary bedtime stories about "Islamofascists" that they can't begin to figure out why people are willing to strap bombs to themselves and blow up a building in the green zone. Until you can understand what's really motivating people, you can't respond appropriately and you can't understand anything when fear pumps chemicals into your brain and activates the fight or flight response.

In Wicked, the wizard seemed awfully Bushian. As a young man, he's a gigolo and he just sort of stumbles into being the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. But if people want to call him wonderful, well, he's happy to let them. He uses Elphaba to create flying monkeys (and they were really great flying monkeys!) that he plans to use as spies and he tells her that you have to give people a group to fear if you hope to unite them.

When Glinda finally throws him out of Oz she quips, "Think of it as regime change." From her lips to the Goddess' ears.