Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Tuesday
Sometimes I imagine that some deity has designed a special test for Republican lawmakers. What will it take, this figure asks them, to reject the man you chose to be your leader? How about if I have him send a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol? What if I have him openly take bribes to enrich himself in office? How about if I have him violate basic articles of the Constitution? Or send out a video of himself as a king in an airplane defecating on the American public? If all that is not enough for you, how about if I have him take a wrecking ball to the White House?
If there’s a more graphic way of depicting Trump’s assault on America than photos of a demolished East Wing, I can’t think of it. The demolition brings to mind the climactic finales of a number of stories, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Fall of the House of Usher, and (a childhood favorite of mine) George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie.
Warning: Today’s post is darker than recent ones as it conjures up worst case scenarios. For a more hopeful outlook, read yesterday’s essay about Percy Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy.
In Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s novel, the last descendant of the Buendia family has finally managed to decipher the predictions made by an old Roma man back when they were founding the town. As Aureliano nears the end of the manuscript, he encounters himself in its pages. “He was so absorbed,” we are told, “that he did not feel the second surge of wind either as its cyclonic strength tore the doors and windows off their hinges, pulled off the roof of the east wing, and uprooted the foundations.” (my emphasis)
And a little later:
Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror.🪞
Then comes the novel’s famous ending:
Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
Climate change is already giving us apocalyptic weather events (Hurricane Melissa, bearing down on Jamaica with 175 mph winds, is the latest), but who needs climate change when one has Donald Trump. Garcia Marquez captures the sense of dread that many feel about the fate of our 250-year experiment in democracy. The focus on the self and on immediate gratification, with no concern for generations to come, is our own version of Garcia Márquez’s solitude. While Trump is speeding it up, this forecast of our demise has been evident for some time.
MacDonald’s novel also contains images of apocalyptic collapse, with greed the primary driver. Curdie has exposed and driven from the court the corrupt ministers who have been keeping the king sedated, and he manages to rouse his sovereign to action so that they can restore order. (The king is a lion rising from his slumber, as Shelley would put it.) After the king and Curdie emerge victorious, Curdie’s father and fellow miners discover gold under the city, which they carefully mine to restore the kingdom’s plundered coffers. Irene and Curdie then marry, become king and queen, and we are told that Gwyntystorm becomes a better city and that “good people grew in it.” Then, however, Trumpism takes over:
But they had no children, and when they died the people chose a king. And the new king went mining and mining in the rock under the city, and grew more and more eager after the gold, and paid less and less heed to his people. Rapidly they sank toward their old wickedness. But still the king went on mining, and coining gold by the pailful, until the people were worse even than in the old time. And so greedy was the king after gold, that when at last the ore began to fail, he caused the miners to reduce the pillars which Peter and they that followed him had left standing to bear the city. And from the girth of an oak of a thousand years, they chipped them down to that of a fir tree of fifty.
What happens next is as predictable as the effect of giving tax breaks to billionaires:
One day at noon, when life was at its highest, the whole city fell with a roaring crash. The cries of men and the shrieks of women went up with its dust, and then there was a great silence.
Where the mighty rock once towered, crowded with homes and crowned with a palace, now rushes and raves a stone-obstructed rapid of the river. All around spreads a wilderness of wild deer, and the very name of Gwyntystorm had ceased from the lips of men.
Trump and his minions are chopping away at America’s foundations as though there’s no tomorrow, whether it’s ballooning the deficit, attacking vaccines, taking an axe to renewable energy, corrupting the Department of Justice, or … (The list goes on and on.)
I turn finally to Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories reveal a sickness at the heart of the republic. (I wrote recently how Poe is a counter to the triumphant individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman.) With the incestuous relationship between Roderick and Madeleine we have an emblem of how America, in its self-absorption, creates a solipsistic bubble that eventually craters in on itself. Think of the relationship that Trump is setting up with his billionaire enablers—they see nothing but their own bottom line—as captured in Roderick’s and Madeleine’s deadly final dance:
For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
When warning against the danger of slavery expansion in his 1858 Senate campaign, Abraham Lincoln famously said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Poe’s narrator has earlier noticed a subtle crack running through the Usher mansion—one that Roderick is oblivious to—and in the final scene, the crack takes the entire house down:
From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could we have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “HOUSE OF USHER.”
Contra Barack Obama’s contention that there is not a red America or a blue America but only the United States of America, we are seeing our own significant cracks. The imploding edifices that we encounter in Garcia Márquez, MacDonald, and Poe are metaphors for societies that have lost their way as they become stagnant or ingrown or corrupt. With the demolition of the East Wing, Trump has provided us with our own metaphor.
Further thought: In focusing on Trump’s demolition, I didn’t mention the palatial ballroom that he is building in its place, an addition that will dwarf the entire White House while providing Trump (or so he envisions it) with a place where the wealthy will come to pay obeisance and offer up bribes. For a description of this dynamic, one can turn to Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” where Prince Prospero builds an “extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste.” In it the prince parties with the rich and famous while the rest of the population are shut out.
Recall that the White House is supposedly “the people’s house.”
And yet another thought: Speaking of fault lines that can bring down a house, a new book by Paul Starr—American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge—sees the American experiment as having faced the danger from the very beginning. “Ever since its birth,” he writes,
the American republic has been like a city built on a geological fault, shaken often by tremors and periodically by earthquakes. The tremors have gotten stronger in recent decades. The question that troubles Americans now is whether the earthquake they are experiencing will reduce their republic to rubble.
And this reminds me of another work, written by Poe’s literary heir and one who, like Poe, dreams America’s nightmares. In Stephen King’s novel IT, where small town America experiences periodic acts of mass violence directed at vulnerable populations, we see the town of Derry, Maine split in two by a vast crevice. Here’s a passage describing the devastation:
As the rumbling built steadily up and up, windows began to shatter, plaster ceilings began to fall, and the inhuman cry of twisting beams and foundations swelled into a frightening chorus. Cracks raced up the bullet-pocked brick face of Machen’s like grasping hands. The cables holding the marquee of the Aladdin Theater out over the street snapped and the marquee came crashing down. Richard’s Alley, which ran behind the Center Street Drug, suddenly filled up with an avalanche of yellow brick as the Brian Dowd Professional Building, erected in 1952, came crashing down. A huge screen of jaundice-colored dust rose in the air and was snatched away like a veil….
And then, at 10:02 A.M., downtown Derry simply collapsed….Cracks raced across the surface of Main Street. They were narrow at first…and then they began to gape like hungry mouths and the sound of the Canal floated up, not muffled now but frighteningly loud. Everything began to shake.
