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Thursday
Whenever a political columnist uses a literary allusion to illustrate a point, I grab onto it as a sign that literature still provides our culture with vibrant images with which to negotiate our troubled times. Recently blogger Greg Olear turned to J.R.R. Tolkien and Washington Irving to depict the workings of Vladimir Putin’s secret police. Meanwhile Armanda Marcotte of Salon compared an anxious Donald Trump to the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Olear sees Putin’s use of secret police as nothing new in Russian history:
From the days of Ivan IV in the late sixteenth century, Russia’s leaders have been extraordinarily ruthless about the application of terror to maintain power. The first secret state police, called the oprichnina, was devised by this first tsar, whom history knows as Ivan the Terrible. Black-clad patrolmen on black mounts descended on towns and villages, like a scene from J.R.R. Tolkien or Washington Irving, leaving death and destruction in their wake.
Passages from The Fellowship of the Ring show us how Putin’s victims must feel when his henchmen come knocking. In the scene, Frodo and Sam are seeking to evade Sauron’s Nazgul or Black Riders:
Round the corner came a black horse, no hobbit-pony but a full-sized horse; and on it sat a large man, who seemed to crouch in the saddle, wrapped in a great black cloak and hood, so that only his boots in the high stirrups showed below; his face was shadowed and invisible.
When it reached the tree and was level with Frodo the horse stopped. The riding figure sat quite still with its head bowed, as if listening. From inside the hood came a noise as of someone sniffing to catch an elusive scent; the head turned from side to side of the road.
And further on:
The sound of hoofs stopped. As Frodo watched he saw something dark pass across the lighter space between two trees, and then halt. It looked like the black shade of a horse led by a smaller black shadow. The black shadow stood close to the point where they had left the path, and it swayed from side to side. Frodo thought he heard the sound of snuffling. The shadow bent to the ground, and then began to crawl towards him.
These scenes terrified me when I was a child.
Irving’s Ichabod Crane is riding a horse when he encounters his own black rider:
In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveler….On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveler in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!—but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle! His terror rose to desperation; he rained a shower of kicks and blows upon Gunpowder, hoping by a sudden movement to give his companion the slip; but the specter started full jump with him. Away, then, they dashed through thick and thin; stones flying and sparks flashing at every bound. Ichabod’s flimsy garments fluttered in the air, as he stretched his long lank body away over his horse’s head, in the eagerness of his flight.
The German S.S. were probably Tolkien’s inspiration for the Nazgul. Frodo and Sam fortunately manage to escape their black riders but Crane, like far too many of Putin’s opponents, meets his demise.
Examining Donald Trump’s psychological response to his upcoming election interference/hush money trial, Marcotte concludes that he is running scared. She points out,
As the trial date nears, his already bizarre behavior is getting worse, like he’s the murderer in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” He posted 77 times on Truth Social on Easter, and that’s not even counting his threatening post depicting Joe Biden being kidnapped.
In Poe’s story, the murderer thinks he has gotten away with killing his neighbor, at least at first, and converses “in a friendly way” with the visiting police officers. Soon, however, he begins to panic. If he were Trump, he would start manically texting:
I soon wished that they would go. My head hurt and there was a strange sound in my ears. I talked more, and faster. The sound became clearer. And still they sat and talked.
Suddenly I knew that the sound was not in my ears, it was not just inside my head. At that moment I must have become quite white. I talked still faster and louder. And the sound, too, became louder. It was a quick, low, soft sound, like the sound of a clock heard through a wall, a sound I knew well. Louder it became, and louder. Why did the men not go? Louder, louder. I stood up and walked quickly around the room. I pushed my chair across the floor to make more noise, to cover that terrible sound. I talked even louder. And still the men sat and talked, and smiled. Was it possible that they could not hear??
Trump is not ravaged by guilt for his alleged election fraud (far from it!), but he certainly keeps speaking louder. With his long Truth Social messages, written in all-caps, and his increasingly unhinged accusations against the calmly talking and smiling Joe Biden, he does indeed sound like Poe’s narrator.
Now all we need is for him to break down and deliver some version of the narrator breaking down: “Yes! Yes, I killed him. Pull up the boards and you shall see! I killed him.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Trump suddenly came clean and admitted that he’s been lying all along about the election being stolen?
To feel the need to confess, however, one must first have a conscience.
