THE EVIL AT THE DRAGON'S FEET

By LANCE MORROW

Beneath Carpaccio's dragon lies a kind of Bosnian litter: half-devoured bodies . skulls . busy, slithering snakes. The painting St. George and the Dragon is a vision of evil perfectly at home in the late 20th century, even though the artist imagined it almost 500 years ago. It gleams like a premonition in the garage-dim Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice. What is missing from the picture in 1995, of course, is the St. George part -- the rescue: Evil impaled, Good's shining blond revenge.

It made some sense that Elie Wiesel chose Venice as the place to bring together 30 interesting adolescents ("Tomorrow's Leaders") from various battlefields around the world (Bosnia, several African countries, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, some of the more violent neighborhoods of American cities) to talk about their lives. Venice, with its gorgeous, impastoed melancholy, exhausted the possibilities of human glory and depravity centuries ago. Wiesel's young, all vulnerability and fire, assembled at the other end of history altogether. Furious at what the blackhearted past has done to them, they made friends across their inherited fault lines (Israeli with Palestinian, Irish Protestant with Irish Catholic, for example) and inspected the future with a kind of fervent wariness, a provisional hope.

In the meantime, of course, the dragon proceeded with his projects. Beside the Venice lagoon, you could practically hear the noise from Bosnia, an hour's hop across the Adriatic. (Some sporting Italians, it is said, fly over for the weekend, hoping to see some shooting and maybe even to do some violence themselves.) Nineteen-year-old Tarja Krehic from Bosnia told the others about the mysterious onset of evil in her neighborhood: "Hate came, I don't know from where." A 19-year-old from Kenya, Kim Muhota, reported that in the streets of Nairobi, children are known to wield discarded hypodermic needles (carrying God knows what viruses of doom) and threaten to jab passersby unless given money-the needles becoming grotesquely miniaturized moral inversions of the St. George lance.

Wiesel meant, in part, to audition the future while it is still in its teens. He told the young, "Some of us have access to the leaders of the world. But all the meetings we have had have been disappointments. So we wanted to start before you become leaders."

Some of the kids' short, traumatized biographies supported an underlying premise-a motif that the older speakers elaborated upon a bit too automatically. Bernard Kouchner, the French doctor who co-founded Madecins Sans Frontieres and Madecins du Monde, stated the theme when he spoke about Bosnia: Today there are 37 wars going on in the world. The adults have failed, he said. Youth must succeed.

Is it true that the adults of the world have so hideously failed? The multilingual hordes of early June tourists surging around the Piazza San Marco suggested the freedom, democracy, prosperity and astonishing mobility achieved in portions of the post-World War II and post-cold war planet. The adults defeated Hitler and dismantled communism. The world remains filled with persistent, ragged atavisms that kill en masse-Rwanda and the Sudan, for example. But there is a fecklessness in the spectacle of adults demonizing their own generation (as, when young, they demonized their elders by saying "Don't trust anyone over 30") and declaring that it is now up to the children to save the world. Nonsense. It is up to the adults to face their responsibilities and protect the children. That is what adults are for. We should not prematurely "empower" children. Tomorrow's leaders will take care of tomorrow.

The suffering of any child shames a decent conscience. The simplest definition of evil begins with whatever makes a child suffer. The most terrible failure of adults has been their inability, or unwillingness, to shoulder the responsibilities of adults and protect children not only from war but also from other, newer, nonmartial forms of destruction. The theme of parentlessness has become pervasive in the world, not merely in Kouchner's 37 wars but also in the supposedly peaceful cultures of success. Hell is answered prayers: greed has an omnivorous life of its own. During the 1960s, American fathers failed in their responsibilities to the young whom they involved in the Vietnam War. Now the moral abdications of adults in the economically successful world have brought down upon their own young inundations of drugs, guns, and a slithering, id-ridden chaos of cultural violence-all the highly profitable artifacts, legal and illegal, of a spiritual devolution as destructive as war.

Adults, whom nature has given the task of protecting children, have made it their business instead to corrupt them. In a degraded culture, the unprotected minds of children come to resemble the litter at the feet of Carpaccio's dragon-filled with an evil imagery.

While presiding over the Venice conference, Elie Wiesel passed the 51st anniversary of his arrival, as an adolescent, at Auschwitz. Wiesel spent time in the heart of evil. Having thus been brought to a knowledge of darkness, he tries to lift the future -- meaning the young -- into a brighter orbit. That is the work of a moral grownup.