Thursday
Yesterday I wrote about how Donald Trump’s preemptive tactics are reminiscent of the double-dealing ape in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle. Today I turn to Lewis’s Silver Chair, this time for a scene that could describe the GOP’s abject surrender to the president. Think of Trump as the witch who kidnaps and enchants Narnia’s Prince Rilian and attempts to do the same with Jill, Eustace and Puddleglum.
The latter three have ventured underground in search of Rilian, only to find him seemingly at liberty and parroting the witch’s talking points. Although he has occasional moments of lucidity, he has been told they are madness episodes and so, at such times, allows himself to be bound to a silver chair.
Think of his lucidity as those moments when Congressional Republicans consider speaking truth to power. For a brief moment, they may even say what they really think before (like Rilian when the “madness” passes) returning to talking points. We saw this last week with Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson:
On Friday, a powerful Republican senator indicated to the Wall Street Journal that he had been concerned this summer that President Trump was creating a quid pro quo with Ukraine by holding up military aid. But he appeared to regret sharing something so potentially damaging and immediately tried to walk back his statements….
In his interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Johnson refused to answer basic questions about why he was concerned about Trump, instead bringing up a completely unrelated conspiracy theory about a former FBI official. “Answer the question that I asked you instead of trying to make Donald Trump feel better here that you’re not criticizing him,” an exasperated host Chuck Todd says at one point.
When the children and the Marsh-wiggle free Rilian, he destroys the chair and prepares to face the witch. She, however, can create alternate facts and proceeds to weave a spell about the group. Your reality is an illusion, she tells them, a version of Trump’s “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening”:
Now the Witch said nothing at all, but moved gently across the room, always keeping her face and eyes very steadily towards the Prince. When she had come to a little ark set in the wall not far from the fireplace, she opened it, and took out first a handful of a green powder. This she threw on the fire. It did not blaze much, but a very sweet and drowsy smell came from it. And all through the conversation which followed, that smell grew stronger, and filled the room, and made it harder to think. Secondly, she took out a musical instrument rather like a mandolin. She began to play it with her fingers—a steady, monotonous thrumming that you didn’t notice after a few minutes. But the less you noticed it, the more it got into your brain and your blood. This also made it hard to think. After she had thrummed for a time (and the sweet smell was now strong) she began speaking in a sweet, quiet voice.
“Narnia?” she said. “Narnia? I have often heard your Lordship utter that name in your ravings. Dear Prince, you are very sick. There is no land called Narnia.”
“Yes there is, though, Ma’am,” said Puddleglum. “You see, I happen to have lived there all my life.”
“Indeed,” said the Witch. “Tell me, I pray you, where that country is?”
“Up there,” said Puddleglum, stoutly, pointing overhead. “I—I don’t know exactly where.”
“How?” said the Queen, with a kind, soft, musical laugh. “Is there a country up among the stones and mortar of the roof?”
“No,” said Puddleglum, struggling a little to get his breath. “It’s in Overworld.”
“And what, or where, pray is this … how do you call it … Overworld?”
Let’s say that “overworld” is a world where facts matter, where no one is above the law, and where the Constitution regulates our behavior. Trump, sadly, is playing his party like a mandolin:
“No. I suppose that other world must be all a dream.”
“Yes. It is all a dream,” said the Witch, always thrumming.
“Yes, all a dream,” said Jill.
“There never was such a world,” said the Witch.
“No,” said Jill and Scrubb, “never was such a world.”
“There never was any world but mine,” said the Witch.
“There never was any world but yours,” said they.
Fortunately, Puddleglum has just enough presence of mind to locate the source of the witch’s magic, stomping out the fire and invoking Aslan. Imagine that he is a GOP member of Congress standing up for the Constitution:
Puddleglum, desperately gathering all his strength, walked over to the fire. Then he did a very brave thing. He knew it wouldn’t hurt him quite as much as it would hurt a human; for his feet (which were bare) were webbed and hard and cold-blooded like a duck’s. But he knew it would hurt him badly enough; and so it did. With his bare foot he stamped on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth. And three things happened at once.
First, the sweet heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell. This instantly made everyone’s brain far clearer. The Prince and the children held up their heads again and opened their eyes.
Secondly, the Witch, in a loud, terrible voice, utterly different from all the sweet tones she had been using up till now, called out, “What are you doing? Dare to touch my fire again, mud-filth, and I’ll turn the blood to fire inside your veins.”
Thirdly, the pain itself made Puddleglum’s head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic.
“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.
Even if constitutional democracy is only a dream, it’s a dream worth believing in and fighting for.
What happens next is what could happen if enough Republicans stood up against Trump: we would see who the tyrant really is. Underneath the pleasing exterior is a snake, which the companions must battle and behead.
Will we ever see the day when the GOP will emerge from Trump’s enchantment and realize that he was a snake all along? After all, in a poem he has quoted at countless campaign rallies, he has long revealed his identity. Appropriating the song lyrics from a black activist (see yesterday’s post on appropriation), Trump relishes the story of an ungrateful snake who bites the woman who saves him:
“I saved you,” cried that woman
“And you’ve bit me even, why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die!”
“Oh shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin,
“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
As the New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, drawing on her experiences with Vladimir Putin, informs us, “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.” Meanwhile, Trump Republicans allow the snake to bite them over and over.
Imagining them loosening the fears that bind them and arising from the silver chair. It’s not too late.
