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Monday
I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen the following passage from The Great Gatsby applied to the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations:
It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . .
I’ve frequently turned to the passage myself, as I did here, here and here. It was therefore irony piled upon irony that Donald Trump held a Gatsby-themed party on the eve of the administration shutting down a food stamp program that serves 42 million people.
A different work that came to my mind as I heard about the affair, however. In Tale of Two Cities, social reformer Charles Dickens knows who is most responsible for the French Revolution. Like Trump, the French aristocracy are oblivious to the suffering of the lower classes.
Let’s start with Trump’s fête in Mar-a-Lago, described in a Dean Obeidallah blog post entitled “Trump throws himself a Great Gatsby party while people can’t even afford ketchup”:
This fête was titled, “A little party never killed nobody”—which was a reference to a song from the 2013 film adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, The Great Gatsby. Photos from Trump’s party reveal people dressed in “Roaring 20’”s garb with feathers and flapper dresses, professional burlesque type dancers hired to entertain and even a scantily clad woman in a huge martini glass.
The Guardian offers more details, including the fact that the event was to reward “nearly 130 deep-pocketed donors, allies and representatives of major companies for a dinner at the White House to reward them for their pledged contributions to a vast new ballroom now expected to cost $300m”:
It was a feast fit for a king – and any billionaire willing to be his subject. From gold-rimmed plates on gold-patterned tablecloths decorated with gold candlestick holders, they gorged on heirloom tomato panzanella salad, beef wellington and a dessert of roasted Anjou pears, cinnamon crumble and butterscotch ice-cream.
“That the federal government had shut down two weeks earlier,” the Guardian article adds, “scarcely seemed to matter.”
Dickens chooses a pampered Monseigneur to dramatize such extravagance in his novel. It requires four men, we are told, to provide him with his morning hot chocolate:
Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips. One lackey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.
This Monseigneur appears to have Trump’s architectural tastes: we see him in a room “adorned with every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could achieve.” Furthermore, the party he throws sounds like the one Trump just hosted. “Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball,” the author tells us, “that was never to leave off”:
[A]ll the company at the grand hotel of Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant swords to look at, and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would surely keep anything going, for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells; and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and his devouring hunger far away.
Those surrounding the Monseigneur, meanwhile, sound a lot like Trump’s cabinet and advisors, starting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth:
Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the score.
The equivalents of Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought also make appearances:
People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State, yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur.
This Monseigneur cares as little for the common people as Trump does. We see this when he travels in his carriage:
It appeared, under the circumstances, rather agreeable to him to see the common people dispersed before his horses, and often barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were charging an enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought no check into the face, or to the lips, of the master.
Nor does it bother him when he is presented with the results. When he learns that his carriage has killed a child, he of course blames the victim. The tall man in the passage is the boy’s father:
“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that.”
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”
Then, as though nothing had happened, the Monseigneur
was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by.
We all know how Tale of Two Cities ends. Our own future is less certain.
