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Tuesday
Here’s a new literary allusion to add to our political lexicon. People who enable narcissists, such as the one we just put in the White House, are being called “flying monkeys.”
According to Adam England in a VeryWellMind article, flying monkeys are people “who carry out the work of a narcissist or an abusive person.” Narcissists will use these monkeys, England explains, “as spies, or to spread rumors, making them act as substitutes for themselves.”
The reference, of course, is to The Wizard of Oz—or maybe now, to Wicked.
Licensed clinical psychologist Lauren Kerwin notes that it’s often difficult to recognize a flying monkey “as they may seem like normal people who are simply taking sides in a disagreement or conflict.” She provides the following list of tell-tale signs:
–They side with the narcissist no matter the situation or evidence presented to them;
–They spread gossip or rumors about you;
–They gaslight or manipulate you;
–They dismiss or trivialize your feelings;
–They pass on information about you to help the narcissist harass you.
In L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, one finds more than a few resemblances between the flying monkeys and Trump’s ardent supporters. In the case of these supporters, they were initially drawn in because they found Trump entertaining—they reveled in how he insulted groups they didn’t like—but in the process they got pulled into something darker. Like storming the Capitol, for instance.
We learn from the head monkey that the monkeys too started out as fairly harmless pranksters. He tells Dorothy how they insulted Quelala, fiancé of the beautiful princess Gayelette:
My grandfather was at that time the King of the Winged Monkeys which lived in the forest near Gayelette’s palace, and the old fellow loved a joke better than a good dinner. One day, just before the wedding, my grandfather was flying out with his band when he saw Quelala walking beside the river. He was dressed in a rich costume of pink silk and purple velvet, and my grandfather thought he would see what he could do. At his word the band flew down and seized Quelala, carried him in their arms until they were over the middle of the river, and then dropped him into the water.
“‘Swim out, my fine fellow,’ cried my grandfather, ‘and see if the water has spotted your clothes.’”
No ultimate harm is done, but while Quelala laughs the incident off, Gayelette is less forgiving:
The princess was angry, and she knew, of course, who did it. She had all the Winged Monkeys brought before her, and she said at first that their wings should be tied and they should be treated as they had treated Quelala, and dropped in the river. But my grandfather pleaded hard, for he knew the Monkeys would drown in the river with their wings tied, and Quelala said a kind word for them also; so that Gayelette finally spared them, on condition that the Winged Monkeys should ever after do three times the bidding of the owner of the Golden Cap. This Cap had been made for a wedding present to Quelala, and it is said to have cost the princess half her kingdom.
Think of this as an FAFO moment (F–k around and find out), which many are predicting for those who voted for Trump.
Quelala makes minimal use of the cap—he tells the monkeys to stay out of Gayelette’s sight, “which we were glad to do”—but the wedding gift becomes far more dangerous when the Wicked Witch of the West gets hold of it.
If we see the transition in ownership from Quelala to the Witch as Trump’s transition from entertainer to fascist, then what begins as a joke turns lethal. The Witch uses the monkeys to enslave the Winkies, drive Oz out of the Land of the West, and capture or destroy Dorothy and her friends. For his part, Trump, as stochastic terrorist, has been inciting certain of his followers to violence, and he now appears prepared to trigger punitive deportations and to weaponize the Department of Justice against his enemies. If he gets a compliant Secretary of Defense, maybe he’ll even order the military to shoot protesters in the legs.
The Witch too incites violence:
Some of the Monkeys seized the Tin Woodman and carried him through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks. Here they dropped the poor Woodman, who fell a great distance to the rocks, where he lay so battered and dented that he could neither move nor groan.
Others of the Monkeys caught the Scarecrow, and with their long fingers pulled all of the straw out of his clothes and head. They made his hat and boots and clothes into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.
The remaining Monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the Lion and wound many coils about his body and head and legs, until he was unable to bite or scratch or struggle in any way.
We can think of the Golden Cap as the red MAGA cap, holding our own winged monkeys in thrall. Pray that our drama ends as Baum’s novel does, with the powers of the cap getting used up and the monkeys returning to their harmless play in the jungle. Until that happens, however, we—like the Winkies, Dorothy, and all who run afoul of our own Wicked Witch—are in peril.
