Wednesday
“Marooned in a blizzard of lies,” goes the Dave Frishberg song, but perhaps “drowned” would be a better verb to use in the current environment of Trump’s bogus indictments, reconfigured history, unhinged tweets, revenge fantasies, wild threats, and nonstop bullshit.
Perhaps it would be bearable if (1) at least some in the GOP were standing up to him and (2) if he wasn’t using the full force and resources of the federal government to add muscle to the words. As it is, former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted for photographing and sharing a political message spelled out in seashells, and FCC Chair Brendan Carr is threatening ABC’s license after comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a gold-digger quip about Melania Trump, a joke whose origin dates back to Chaucer if not earlier.
Let’s start with the joke as I want to end with a seashell poem that can be applied to the Comey indictment. Pretending to address the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the attendant guests, Kimmel at one point said, “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”
After a gunman attempted to crash the actual dinner two days later, Melania Trump accused the comedian of hate speech. His “monologue about my family,” she wrote, “isn’t comedy — his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.” Then she added,
People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”
Like clockwork, Trump and his minions piled on. The president said Kimmel should be fired while his press secretary, in a classic example of faux outrage, asked, “Who in their right minds says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband?”
Setting aside the fact that there’s nothing in Kimmel’s joke that suggests he was rooting for Trump’s murder, the story of a young wife who wants her old husband out of the way shows up in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” where the young wife of an elderly carpenter devises an elaborate plan to sideline him so that she can make love to their student lodger. There’s also “The Merchant’s Tale,” in which elderly January marries 20-year-old May in order to have an heir, only for her to have a fling with young Damian in (wait for this!) a pear tree.
Three centuries later the joke was still going strong. In John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728), for instance, there is this interchange between Peachum and his daughter Polly, who wants to marry Mac the Knife:
Peachum: And had not you the common view of a gentlewoman in your marriage, Polly?
Polly: I don’t know what you mean, sir.
Peachum: Of a Jointure, and of being a widow.
Polly: But I love him, sir; how then could I have thoughts of parting with him?
Peachum: Parting with him! Why, this is the whole scheme and intention of all marriage articles. The comfortable estate of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wife’s spirits. Where is the woman who would scruple to be a wife, if she had it in her power to be a widow, whenever she pleased? If you have any views of this sort, Polly, I shall think the match not so very unreasonable.
And then there’s Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Ernest (1895), which for all I know is the direct source of Kimmel’s joke:
Lady Bracknell: I’m sorry if we are a little late, Algernon, but I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury. I hadn’t been there since her poor husband’s death. I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger.
And a little further on:
Bracknell: I had some crumpets with Lady Harbury, who seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now.
Algernon: I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief.
Bracknell: It certainly has changed its color. From what cause I, of course, cannot say.
If the Trumps had a more affectionate marriage or if Melania weren’t so clearly a trophy wife, Kimmel’s joke wouldn’t land. As it is, one can’t imagine the first lady being heartbroken if her husband were to move on.
Imagining a world without Trump was also probably the impulse that led Comey to photograph and share a collection of seashells spelling out “8647.” Apparently “86” is slang for disposing of and has been used for everything from indicating that a menu item is no longer available to bouncing unwelcome guests from a nightclub to murder. Trump, meanwhile, is the 47th president, so there you go.
To be sure, when Joe Biden was president, there was an “8646 Joe Biden” tee-shirt, but no one saw this as anything other than a desire to be rid of him. With former Trump attorney Todd Blanche auditioning to become Attorney General, however, he has opted for the interpretation that will please his boss: Comey must be threatening the president.
Stephens’s “The Shell” captures how one can go spiraling down a dark train of thought following a seemingly innocent encounter:
The Shell
By James Stephens
And then I pressed the shell
Close to my ear
And listened well,
And straightway like a bell
Came low and clear
The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas,
Whipped by an icy breeze
Upon a shore
Wind-swept and desolate.
It was a sunless strand that never bore
The footprint of a man,
Nor felt the weight
Since time began
Of any human quality or stir
Save what the dreary winds and waves incur.
And in the hush of waters was the sound
Of pebbles rolling round,
Forever rolling with a hollow sound.
And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go
Swish to and fro
Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey.
There was no day,
Nor ever came a night
Setting the stars alight
To wonder at the moon:
Was twilight only and the frightened croon,
Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind
And waves that journeyed blind—
And then I loosed my ear … O, it was sweet
To hear a cart go jolting down the street.
When Biden was elected president, I remember feeling something akin to such sweetness. Finally life could return to something as normal as a cart jolting down the street. No longer would we have to think about the presidency every day.
Then, of course, Trump was reelected and our lives once again became sunless strands, windswept and desolate.
