Monday
Apparently I am not the only one who thought of Tolkien’s Dead Marshes as Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool saga got more, well, Trumpian. Someone even posted a picture of the Reflecting Pool as those marshes, with the Washington Monument murkily reflected and Frodo and Sam about to wade in. As the pool becomes an algae-infested swamp, it has provided as apt an analogy for the Trump administration as one could imagine. Minnesota governor Tim Walz summed it up well:
Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.
In case you haven’t been following the story, Trump has become obsessed with the long, oblong body of water that reflects the Washington Monument. After blaming Obama and Biden for neglecting it, he hired a supporter with no pool experience to paint the bottom “American flag blue” and fix the filtration system. Since then, there has been a major algae bloom, even as pieces of the coating detach and float to the surface. As one pool expert tweeted,
We would have never used epoxy on natural stone that had been submerged for 100 years. They didn’t even use a primer. For $12 million lol
Now Park Service employees are wading around in hip boots pouring in chemicals. Meanwhile, a passing bicyclist was arrested for sticking his hand in the water to see what was going on. Which brings us to Tolkien.
Frodo and Sam, with Gollum as their guide, must thread their way through the Dead Marsh on their way to Mount Doom. It’s a grim scene:
The fens grew more wet, opening into wide stagnant meres, among which it grew more and more difficult to find the firmer places where feet could tread without sinking into gurgling mud. The travellers were light, or maybe none of them would ever have found a way through.
At one point Sam stumbles:
He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled. For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water,’ he said with horror. ‘Dead faces!’
The symbolism writes itself. As we approach our 250th birthday, Trump dreamed of a reflecting pool that looked like a suburban swimming pool, just as he wants American history to be scrubbed of anything that doesn’t look like his 1950s Leave It to Beaver image. The messy parts (slavery, land theft, labor unrest) are all to be left out. The past, however, refuses to die but comes oozing back. The melting pot as slimy green mess.
Ken Burns has given us a much more honest picture of the American Revolution than we will be getting in the coming days. While there were moments of extraordinary heroism, there were also moments of dark brutality, including deliberate genocide against Native American populations. In some ways, it was more civil war than revolution.
Here, meanwhile, is the history behind the dead faces that Sam sees:
‘Who are they? What are they?’ asked Sam shuddering, turning to Frodo, who was now behind him.
‘I don’t know,’ said Frodo in a dreamlike voice. ‘But I have seen them too. In the pools when the candles were lit. They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them.’ Frodo hid his eyes in his hands. ‘I know not who they are; but I thought I saw there Men and Elves, and Orcs beside them.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Gollum. ‘All dead, all rotten. Elves and Men and Orcs. The Dead Marshes. There was a great battle long ago, yes, so they told him when Sméagol was young, when I was young before the Precious came. It was a great battle. Tall Men with long swords, and terrible Elves, and Orcses shrieking. They fought on the plain for days and months at the Black Gates. But the Marshes have grown since then, swallowed up the graves; always creeping, creeping.’
I suspect that Tolkien surfaced some of these nightmare images from the World War I trenches in which he served, where sometimes the dead would be buried forever in the mud.
As we know from Freud and Jung, that which we repress returns as monstrosity. The Creature of the Green Lagoon is always creeping, creeping. Better to face our history outright.
