Monsters are not what they used to be.
I’m reading “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley for
school, and the monster is magnificent. He starts out with an elegance of mind
and sweetness of temperament, reading Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Sorrows
of Young Werther” and gathering firewood for a poor family. But his creator,
Victor Frankenstein, abandons him and refuses him a mate to calm his
loneliness. The creature finds no one who does not recoil in fear and disgust
from his stitched-together appearance, his yellow skin and eyes and black lips.
Embittered, he seeks revenge on his creator and the world.
اضافة اعلان
“Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am
irrevocably excluded,” he laments. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a
fiend.”
Before he disappears into the Arctic at the end of
the book, he muses that once he had “high thoughts of honor,” until his
“frightful catalog” of malignant deeds piled up.
Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness
and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the
stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and
he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.
It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind
that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating,
corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of
Chaos to burnish his title.
We listened Thursday night to the frightful catalog
of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to fathom, that in some
ways, it’s all still sinking in.
The House January 6 committee’s prime-time hearing
was not about Trump as a bloviating buffoon who stumbled into the presidency.
It was about Trump as a callous monster, and many will come away convinced that
he should be criminally charged and put in jail. Lock him up!
The hearing drove home the fact that Trump was
deadly serious about overthrowing the government. If his onetime lap dog Mike
Pence was strung up on the gallows outside the Capitol for refusing to help
Trump hold onto his office illegitimately, Trump said, so be it. “Maybe our
supporters have the right idea,” he remarked that day, chillingly, noting that
his vice president “deserves it.”
Liz Cheney cleverly used the words of former Trump
aides to show that, despite his malevolent bleating, Trump knew there was no
fraud on a level that would have changed the election results.
“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of
saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the
president was bullshit,” William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, said.
Breaking from her father, Ivanka Trump — in a taped
deposition — said she embraced Barr’s version of reality: “I respect Attorney
General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.”
It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title.
(Her husband, Jared Kushner, won the prize for gall
in his deposition: He was too busy arranging pardons for sleazeballs to pay
attention to whether Trump aides were threatening to quit over the sleazeball
in the Oval.)
Trump’s data experts told him bluntly that he had
lost. “So there’s no there there,” Mark Meadows commented.
Trump just could not stand being labeled a loser —
his father’s bête noire. He maniacally subverted the election out of pure
selfishness and wickedness, knowing it is easy to manipulate people on social
media with the Big Lie.
It was fine with him if his followers broke the law
and attacked the police and went to jail, while he praised their “love” from
afar. It’s amazing that no lawmakers were killed.
Everywhere you look, there’s something that makes
your blood run cold. The monster in “Frankenstein” is not the only one who has
forsaken “thoughts of honor.”
Russia, also in the grip of a monster, is invading
and destroying a neighboring democracy for no reason, except Vladimir Putin’s
delusions of grandeur.
In Uvalde, Texas, the unfathomable story unspools
about how police delayed rescuing schoolchildren for an hour because a
commander was worried about the officers’ safety.
Greedy golf icons joined a tour underwritten by the
Saudis, even though the Saudi crown prince ordered a journalist dismembered.
(Kushner is under investigation about whether he traded on his government
position to secure a $2 billion investment from the Saudis for his new private
equity firm.)
As Bennie Thompson, the chair of the committee,
noted, when the Capitol was attacked in 1814, it was by the British. This time,
it was by an enemy within, egged on by the man at the heart of the democracy he
swore to protect.
“They did so at the encouragement of the president
of the United States,” Thompson said of the mob, “trying to stop the transfer
of power, a precedent that had stood for 220 years.”
It’s mind-boggling that so many people still embrace
Trump when it’s so plain that he cares only about himself. He was quick to
throw his daughter Ivanka Trump off the sled Friday, indicating her opinion did
not count since she “was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election
results. She had long since checked out.”
Let some conservatives dismiss the hearings as “A Snooze
Fest.” Let Fox News churlishly refuse to run them.
The hearing was mesmerizing, describing a horror
story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Shelley
could have appreciated. The ratings were boffo, with nearly 20 million viewers.
Caroline Edwards — the tough Capitol Police officer
who suffered a concussion, was sprayed in her eyes and got back up to return to
the fight — described a hellscape.
“I was slipping in people’s blood,” she recalled.
“You know, I — I was catching people as they fell. I — you know, I was — it was
carnage.”
In his dystopian Inaugural speech, Trump promised to end
“American carnage.” Instead, he delivered it. Now he needs to be held
accountable for his attempted coup — and not just in the court of public
opinion.
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