Ghillie and Boo Boo, on a cold day outside of Genessee, ID

One of my favorite literary tropes comes from one of the most talented fantasy writers of all time — someone who, with maybe a little literary polish, might give J.R.R. Tolkien a little run for his money. 

I’m talking about Michael Moorcock, known for writing pulp fantasy fiction, and notably expanding a number of genres in superhero fiction that are accepted de facto plot devices across lots of fantasy universes. Though he did not, for example, invent the idea of the Multiverse, Moorcock gave it real legs. And instead of Good vs. Evil, Moorcock introduced the idea of the Cosmic Balance — Law vs. Chaos. The gods of his creation were also semi-disposable — they could be killed by heroes in Moorcock’s Multiverse.

Moorcock achieved notoriety through his Eternal Champion series, which took place across space and time, on a variety of different worlds, and with a set of characters that roamed all over the Cosmic Balance. The most impressive thing about these ideas was that he came up with these in his 20s. It’s almost unbelievable.

One of his most famous characters was Elric of Melnibone’, a somewhat chaotic evil prince, with a conscience. He rules over the Kingdom of Melnibone’, an island kingdom, stagnating in decadent decline, as some kind of humanoid, half-elf prince, with a troubled mind. He’s supposed to just be taking advantage of his populace that he governs, and spend time screwing his sister — in fact, said populace can’t understand why he doesn’t. But instead, he embarks on a series of adventures in about six books, written in non-sequential order. For those interested in the fine detail, the Wikipedia page on Elric is pretty good. 

Elric is a weak albino prince, and counts on various herbal medicines to even maintain day-to-day. But most important in Elric’s world is his sword, Stormbringer. Stormbringer is the iconic Black Sword, actually an incarnation of an evil mage, and when Elric wields Stormbringer, every time he kills an enemy, he receives some of the strength through the sword of his fallen foe. But it’s more than that. Stormbringer eats his foe’s souls. No reincarnation, no afterlife, is possible if you are killed by Stormbringer. If that doesn’t give you shivers, you really are a true atheist. 

It should come as no surprise that in the end, Stormbringer kills Elric, and basically everyone he loves, even as he vanquishes the foes in front of him. 

Having fought long, pitched battles in the various wilderness timber wars, the Stormbringer trope has long been resonant for me. Though I spent a piece of my activist career on the famous 2001 Clinton Roadless Rule, that ended up protecting over 58M acres of roadless forests across the United States, most of my activism was centered on saving the Clearwater and Nez Perce NF in north-central Idaho. That story is here, in a book I wrote back in the mid-’90s. There, the US Forest Service – USFS – (not just there, BTW) was famous for having a given timber sale shot down, and then resurrecting it with some of the legal weaknesses wrung out of the various Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) that are required when you want to hack up a piece of pristine country. The USFS wouldn’t go back to the drawing board. They’d reissue basically the same sale with some allusion to the legal argument made by us in front of the federal judge, and then we’d go back through the rinse cycle. 

I don’t think I was the only person calling them Zombie Timber Sales, but they certainly were. And one can see why the Stormbringer idea was particularly appealing. If you didn’t have a tool to suck the soul out of a given project, it would be back. Again and again.

Naturally, when we would win a round, it was as exhilarating a feeling as one could get. But victory was only short-lived. Most of the public still doesn’t believe the USFS sells timber, and views the USFS like the National Park Service — people there to protect our remaining wild country. They basically wear the same uniforms, after all. And most of the places we were fighting to save were, and still really are unknown in the public eye.

Destroying timber sales, even if only temporary, taught me a lot about politics, though. The USFS had, and still has no problem with lying to the public on a whole host of issues, including exactly what they do. And while most people who know even a little bit might believe there are things like the Endangered Species Act (ESA) protecting rare creatures on the landscape, the reality is that statutory law like the ESA, or a host of other acronyms, are only part of the picture. The other real, emergent driver is what I call the Law of the Budget. If Congress decrees that money will be spent on planning timber sales, you had better believe that timber sales will run what is done on any given National Forest. Following the money doesn’t always take you to the end destination. But I guarantee it will get you close.

The whole idea of Stormbringer, though, is very useful in our current psychopathic political environment. It’s no accident that Stormbringer fit well in Elric’s hands for all his adventures. I’ve had the recent experience of helping consult on a number of national issues, and the biggest flaw I’ve seen across the board is people attempting to rationalize the irrational. Things are done in our society not so much for any rational purpose, and unpacking it basically makes you spend all your intellectual energy attempting to empathize with their position on the topical level. 

But that’s really not what’s going on now. We’re undergoing a psychosocial relational downshifting that is intended to fragment us, and it’s working. It is indeed amplified by social media, because while it is possible for social media to create larger connected narratives, it mostly doesn’t. Or rather, it hands the megaphone to the various actors who can create compact sound bites that quite literally “feel right”. They factually may not have anything to do with reality, but they map with the reality that people want, or their emotions are familiar with.

The lesson of Stormbringer is that if you really want to kill an unreal thing like a zombie, or our current batch of psychopathic politicians, you need a chaotic evil sword. You need to get down on whatever the Survival v-Meme level your opponent is really functioning on, and not listen to their bullshit reasons, which, if they’re psychopathic, are just stories made up to confuse you and drain your energy. You need to hack out the soul out of your opponent, and drink in all that chaotic energy for yourself. That’s the price — and the benefit– of dealing with the truly Undead.

But it’s all problematic, of course. Remember what happened at the end of the story cycle to Elric.