San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Like a vampire, democracy gets knocked out but lives on
I emailed Dracula’s people because I was heading to Romania for a global democracy forum
While I’m in Bucharest, I asked, could I come up to Transylvania and interview him? After all, the count, through 600 years, has seen many dark times for democracy.
In reply, I got a cryptic text telling me to arrive by midnight at an address high in the Hollywood Hills above L.A. The place was so dark I had to turn on my iPhone flashlight to find the door.
But at my knock, the world’s most famous vampire opened the door and ushered me in.
Dracula: Welcome to my castle in the air. Now, can my servant Renfield get you something to drink? Want to join me for a pint of O-negative?
Me: Thanks, but I’m fine, count.
D: Please, call me Vlad. And suit yourself. I need a drink from a stiff before discussing democracy these days.
Me: What are you doing in L.A.?
D: Romania will always be home, but decades ago, I realized Hollywood would never stop calling. I used to stay with my friend Bela Lugosi, but he got tired of the LAPD asking for me every time teenage girls got hickeys. So, I had this place built.
It’s paid for itself. To date, more than 80 films have been made about me. Yes, those Netflix execs — who suck more blood in one pitch meeting than I have in my whole existence — don’t pay well. But my Creative Artists Agency vampire gets me steady work story consulting.
Me: Do you see the story of Dracula having an impact on how the world runs?
D: Sometimes I worry I have too much impact. Porphyria — the so-called “vampire disease” because you have trouble with sunlight — used to be rare. Now, with everyone up late and on their screens, people are becoming more like me. The fact that we’re so atomized makes democratic self-government difficult.
Me: Vlad, you’ve been around longer than anyone living — as a human you ruled Wallachia in the 1400s and became globally famous with Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula.” In all that time, what has changed the most in how humans govern themselves?
D: What’s changing the most is the very nature of what it means to be human. And that’s changed selfgovernment and everything else.
We not only live longer, but we never go away. I died in 1476, yet I’m still around, sort of human. Artificial intelligence means that humans can stay alive digitally long after our human bodies are dust. We are all vampires now.
Which means that humans need to take a much longer view and build more flexible institutions. Because humans and vampires alike are changing so fast. Look at me. I started as this figure of fear — of violence, of disease. I was the bad, undead guy. But now in popular culture, I’m the cool Gothic mainstay, an outsider. Just look at how I’m portrayed by younger, better-looking actors.
The secret of my success is flexibility: I don’t fit into categories or labels. I’m good and I’m bad, real and unreal, dead and alive. And this makes me emblematic of what the British literary historian Nick Groom calls our “vampirocene era … in which the human race has the transformed the world, but in doing so has also lost its primacy.”
Me: Vampirocene? You’re saying the world is getting better?
D: It’s definitely more inclusive and democratic. That sounds strange — Dracula, optimist. But that’s only because so many people are still thinking too short-term.
Look at Romania. Just two generations ago, we were ruled by a far
crueler villain than I ever was, communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. But we learn from failure, not from success. Now Romania is in the European Union, and we have a real democracy, despite the pressures from that other Vlad in Russia, who impaled way more people than me.
Me: Aren’t you worried about right-wing gains in June’s European elections?
D: Sure. The world seems full of good men — but there are monsters in it.
There are always people trying to scapegoat democracy for problems. There are always tyrants trying to kill off democracy.
Just like there are always people who hate vampires. Some hate us so much that, like that Buffy chick, they seek to slay us.
But no matter how hard they try to kill us, we vampires keep coming back, because people want us. Take “Interview with the Vampire” — it was a book, a movie and now a TV show, all huge hits! The same thing is true of democracy. Look at Turkey — its national government goes theocratic and authoritarian, and yet its cities respond by becoming more democratic.
Democracy and vampires have a lot in common.