Friends of mine were sharing a meme today that got me thinking. It was an amusing thought experiment about what would happen if Mr Rogers encountered Thor and his hammer, and how it would turn into an inspirational teaching moment wherein they enacted the greatest Habitat for Humanity build of all time. Immediately I went searching for the video for the Ultimate Showdown ("This is the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny; Good guys, bad guys, and explosions, as far as the eye can see; And only one will survive; I wonder who it will be...") In that video, every famous hero, villain, and pop culture superstar battles each other in a violent, bloody battle of ridiculous proportions. At the end, the only hero standing is a bloodied Mr Rogers, with a thousand-yard stare.
The song has now been stuck in my head all day, and I feel like this is what I have been watching play out for the last several months. Everyone with any thread of fame or power is engaged. Everyone lands a punch here and there. Some participants have been vanquished, either in heroic symbolic deaths, or in ignominy and shame. No bystander can look away. Unlikely heroes are rising to the top. The darling combatant of the last twenty-four hours is John McCain, after he had been briefly cast as a villain of this piece. Secondary and tertiary characters on the entire political spectrum are surprising all of us with unexpected realignments of their alliances and beliefs. Good guys have had misdeeds revealed. Pigeonholed figures on the extremes are breaking out to speak sanity in the middle. I have found myself following (on Twitter) former staffers of presidential administrations I thought I could never relate to, and pundits I thought I actually hated. Hate is a very strong word, and to find out that they were really relatable people, not two-dimensional sketches of bad guys, was a revelation.
And the Mr Rogers of this whole thing is a man whose reputation in this country is absolutely unassailable, although some people are trying hard to find a speck of tarnish on it. Left, right, and center, Special Counsel Mueller is respected by millions of Americans for his service to the country and his unwillingness to lower his standards of behavior. I saw someone write that if Hollywood has taught us anything over the last century, is that everyone loves a G man hero. If he were a little bit younger, I might predict that when everything is over, for better or for worse, the survivors of the political mess would look to him to be our champion, to be a white knight who deserves to win the next election. I can imagine a push from the center to do such a thing. But by the time he is done with his job, months or years from now, he may decide that his service to his country is done, and he could walk off into the sunset, into the pages of the history books. I expect to wave to him as he goes, and wish him godspeed, after it's all over, when we usher in a whole new cast of characters for the next round of this play.
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