I see him as a figure come to life from myth and story, the Wounded King, also known as the Fisher King.

He is holed up in his bedroom, raging over his cable channels, or hunching silently over his golf cart at Mar-a-Largo, scowling in his blue suit in the Cabinet Room, or bullying a reporter in the White House Briefing Room, or staring out at the ocean alongside his golf course in Scotland, seeing nothing except the reflection of his shroud in the water.

A lot of people dislike, even hate Donald Trump, but I find him fascinating. They will be talking about him for eons, long after people like me are long forgotten.

He touches me; there is something tragic and broken – and yes, fragile – there. He has worked himself into all of our imaginations, hopes, and fears. I’ve never seen another human so easily wounded; he dies the death of a thousand cuts almost every day.

His tweets seem like nothing more than cries for help.

He is larger than life, one of those rare creatures who impact and meaning loom far more significant than his own life. Hannah Arendt reminds us not to look up to high when it comes to evil; very small people commit the worst of it.

I keep seeing him like a ghost of past Kings, a figure from Greek Tragedy,  or the Morality Plays of Medieval England.  And now, the legend of the Fisher King. He is much bigger than himself; he got himself so far.

He demands that each one of us decide who we are.

How many other people have done that?

Like the Fisher King, Trump is becoming his own epic story, and to be honest, ours as well. In his morality play, he is a modern evocation of one of the oldest and wealthiest myths there is.

He tweets while his people die.

The story of the Fisher King emerges from the ages; it is an example of what Mythologist Joseph Campbell called the “Monomyth,”

That is the story of man’s search for himself, the mythic journey each one of us has been called to make in recent weeks, and during our life – the hero journey.

We set out on a grand adventure to find ourselves; we either perish along the way or, if we are lucky,  come back knowing who we are and with wisdom to share freely.

It’s called the Mythic Perspective; it’s like looking in the mirror in America in 2020. Some people make it, some people don’t.

The Fisher King was the keeper of the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend, an enduring figure in literature, one of the most powerful of the ancient myths.

The earliest versions of this story – there are many different versions – show the King as suffering a moral, not a physical wound – the result not of accident or war or sickness but his ethical failings.

The wound has left the King crippled and flailing. And sick.

The mortal wound does not heal.

Even worse, in its wake, the King’s moral failings creep out to poison his kingdom, in the process reducing the abundance and richness of life to a barren waste, spawning hatred and conflict in a once unified land.

The healing question, the one he is waiting to hear, is this: “whom does the Grail serve?” but no one has appeared to ask it.

The Holy Grail has been the most sought after Christian relic in popular culture for thousands of years.

It is most commonly identified as the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper, and that Joseph used to collect his blood when Jesus was crucified.

In Celtic mythologies, the Grail became a common theme in the vast literature related to King Arthur, whose knights were said to have sought the Grail all over the Western and Eastern world.

For me, the story of the Wounded King is emblematic of contemporary culture, as are the stories of Greek Tragedy and the Morality Plays of medieval Europe.

The Fisher King, the keeper of the Grail, is wounded by his failure to see beauty if he can grasp profit instead. The significant moral failure of this King is the refusal to value life itself in favor of economic advantage or political power.

One mythical scholar described the Fisher King as an advocate of a “devastating stupidity” about the need to honor and save our earth and live by ethical, rather than financial considerations.

All the great myths and tragedies and poems of the ancient world have almost the same plot—the powerful protagonist, so skilled at amassing power but doomed by his flaws. They were obsessed with morality. In our world, all the morality stories are on Reality TV.

Perhaps this reflects an aching desire for honor and decency. We only rarely get it, but we never stop aching for it.

I find that the story of the Fisher King resonates with the story of our country right now. The key to Trump can’t be unlocked by hating him, only by understanding him. As dominant and powerful as he is in our lives, he is nothing new. The key to understanding him comes from the past, not the present.

Every great writer, playwright, mythologist, and philosopher has imagined him for thousands of years in one form or another. “Demagogues,” wrote Mencken, “are like lice, they are everywhere, always. They don’t have long life spans; they run hot, they burn themselves out.”

And here he is, on our screens a hundred times a day, raging and whining and insulting and scheming and blaming.

For nearly three hundred years, our Republic has served as a model and inspiration to the world for freedom, invention, immigration,  and despite our many moral failings, a light unto the world.

America said a  German politician recently, “was once the hope of the world. It’s getting to be a joke.”

Our system is built in the idea of compromise, of putting the greater good ahead of narrower interests.  It was the first democratic experiment to function peacefully for so long. It was the envy of people all over the world.

Sometimes we lose, sometimes we win, but the country always came first.

That has changed, and if Donald Trump isn’t responsible for all of the change, he has become its ardent champion.

Our sense of commonality has been poisoned, our much-admired political system reduced to waste by greed, tribalism, and hatred, our vaunted justice system under siege, and already tainted.

For millennia, the oceans have thrived with breathtaking life, from fish to rich coral life to plentiful supplies of fish. In our time, human activity has poisoned the oceans, is melting the polar ice and is exhausting the seas; scientists now call this blue world a dead sump of denied life.

You might say the same thing of our once revered and admired system of political compromise and comity.

Our government is broken, said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at his press conference on Monday. “It doesn’t work anymore. We have to fix it.”

So that is the Holy Grail in the modern version of the Wounded King.  Fixing us. Saying the magic words and doing the deeds that bring our country back.

We sit, wounded, and worried and divided, waiting for one of Arthur’s Knights to show up and say the magic words.

Today, wrote Jay Griffiths in Orion Magazine, “the market economy is king, and the moral economy is wounded.”

For us, in 2020, the question isn’t who the Holy Grail serves, but what is the Holy Grail for our leaders, for us?

The problem with our Fisher King is that ethics are ignored as a wealthy minority wipes out the civility and ethos of our government and denies the brutality we are inflicting on our poor and vulnerable and on the earth itself.

In our culture, and at this moment, Andrew Cuomo has curiosity and almost mythically arisen as the dutiful Knight Parsival, send by Arthur to return moral authority to the lost kingdom, and asking the question everyone has been waiting to hear:

“Whom does the Grail Serve?”

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Thanks to Barbara Stender for jogging my memory about the Wounded King.