There are a TON of things that are going to be happening over the next couple of weeks, including Holy Week and Easter! I don’t know how much I’ll be writing Saturday Notes. I suspect I will, but here’s your heads up in case I don’t.
I’m reading another Sanderson book, by the way. And I finished season four of Young Justice this morning!
My Friday was a bit rough, and I had one of those existential, “Does anything actually matter?” afternoons, but I DID tell myself that I was going to write this Note, and given the subject matter I thought it was important that I got to it. I’d been putting off this one long enough, though I’ll admit that I pulled a lot of these ideas from the blog of author Matthew Arthur Larkee; however, I wanted to take my own stab at the subject matter.
So here we are.
A Marxist Reading of Dragons Love Tacos
So there are a couple of children’s picture books titled “Dragons Love Tacos,” which on the surface, are about the idea that a specific mythical creature loves tacos. And that is a great idea for a children’s book. But once you are an adult and you look at the story, you can’t help but pick up a critically important message about the world, its state, and the path we should take moving forward. Perchance.
The story goes like this: dragons love tacos. Frickin’ love the things. If you throw a party at your house, and you want the dragons to show up, you make sure you serve tacos and they’ll be sure to be there. There is a risk, however: if the dragons consume any spicy salsa, it will trigger uncontrollable fire breath and your house will burn down. The sequel shows a world in which there are no tacos because the dragons ate them all, so they build a time machine to go to a past in which there are more tacos.
Children write off this as a silly picture book about a mythical creature and a food item. But even from that brief synopsis we, as grown-ups, can see the important message the author and illustrator wanted to impart for the world, using allegory to sneak the moral message for the proletariat past the birgwahzee. Perchance.
The story first prompts us to ask ourselves, “Who are the dragons in our society? And what, or who, are the tacos?” This is elementary, of course–throughout the history of Western Civilization, dragons have long been used as symbols of avarice and worldly malevolence. In medieval folklore they sit upon beds of gold, hoarding it for themselves in a world of working peasants being crushed into poverty through factory work run by capitalist industrialists. The dragons are representative then of the people who are greedy, powerful, and happily take what isn’t theirs. The dragons are, perchance, capitalists!
“What about the tacos?” Once again, it’s blindingly obvious to the reader who is awoken to the plight of the working class. The tacos are the things that the capitalists want: resources that they will greedily consume without regard to what the proletterat needs to survive. But what about the salsa? Here things get tricky, but not indecipherable. Sometimes, we see capitalists (especially those in technology) try to use things they don’t understand, forgetting or underestimating the ill effects. Right now, as the tech world is being gripped in an AI craze, we see that there are those who are happily touting AI-generated content as the way to change the world for the better, heedless of how it affects people’s welfare, or the possibility that AI will definitely try kill us all if we let it (and, symbolically, burn down the “house” (that’s the planet) in which we are throwing our “party” (that’s life)). But even if we step away from the headlines, there are other things that the salsa can represent, such as fossil fuels, being used without regard to the planet’s safety, once again ruining our “house” (that’s the planet).
Perchance, the time machine. Proposed technology like time machines and space shuttles are attempts by capitalists to avoid responsibility for cleaning up the problems of the world that they contributed to. Consider, for instance, the speculative documentary Terra Nova, which hypothesizes the fantasy of what would happen if humans, after ruining the Earth, found an unexplained time portal that led them to the Mesozoic Era, allowing them to settle in a world untouched by pollution and overpopulation. It’s a temporary escape, but not an actual solution, as the world from which the pioneers arrived is still going through the ruin caused by their own “dragons.”
With all of this in mind, I recommend that all aspiring economists, sociologists, philosophers, stenographers, anthropolologists, and mycologists read both Dragons Love Tacos, these topological masterpieces of text and illustration, as soon as possible, and push for it to be incorporated into the basic college curriculum. It is absolutely essential that our scholars are exposed to Dragons Love Tacos in their formative years so that they can be equipped to handle the struggles of our world and take on the challenges caused by the uncaring birjwadzy.
Perchance.
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