MY MONSTER FROM HIS SLAB BEGAN TO RISE, AND SUDDENLY
Most of you aren’t old enough to remember the early days of television, when many local stations drew a cult audience to the late, late show by programming 1930s monster movies on a Friday or Saturday night. Suddenly, Frankenstein and Dracula were cool again. And since nature and Hollywood both abhor a vacuum, a raft of new films began to ring changes on the old Universal horror pictures.
One of them was FRANKENSTEIN 1970, which was released in 1958. It had its world premiere in Wichita, Kansas, which tells you what the producers thought of its box office chances. But who was I – an 11 year old Wichita kid – to pass up the world premiere of a monster movie? (In the interest of full transparency, I’ll confess that I don’t remember a damn thing about the movie itself, only about going downtown to see it.)
Today’s Republicans, though, make the cinematic monsters of yesteryear seem almost like Sesame Street characters. The Mummy, the Wolfman, Dracula, and Frankenstein all had more interesting backstories than their modern counterparts in the GOP, but the contemporary Republican Party is way more destructive.
I’ve often cited William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” as an appropriate metaphor for the Trump Era. The center is struggling to hold, and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Can blood-dimmed tides be far behind?
To which I’ll add the (translated) words of Antonio Gramsci, who nearly a century ago, wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
What’s the harm in letting Trump vent for a few days before he concedes, his Republican enablers asked? Off the record, of course, because Trump would mean-tweet them in a heartbeat if they said it publicly. Well, now we know the harm, or at least part of it. With three weeks to go before Joe Biden is sworn in, Trump is talking openly of sedition, and most congressional Republicans are too scared of him to utter a peep.
Our Monster-In-Chief understood that he’d lose if all the votes were counted, so his inner circle devised a plan to steal the election by not counting all the votes. We know this because Trump bragged about it repeatedly. In public. Maybe it’s a rich man’s power move – telling the competition what you’re going to do and daring them to stop you. In politics, though, it’s risky to share details of your brilliant plan with the competition. That’s especially true if your plan involves breaking lots of laws.
And while I realize that hindsight is 20-20, I have to believe that future historians will question the wisdom of putting Larry, Moe, and Curly (sorry, I meant Rudy, Lin, and Sidney) in charge of executing this brilliant plan. The kraken they released turned out to be as ephemeral as Tinker Bell, whose very existence (in the theatrical version of Peter Pan) depended on the audience’s willingness to clap for her. They should have brought in Jeb Bush to reprise is famous “Please clap” moment.
As all good MAGA cultists know to be true, Trump can never fail. He can only be betrayed. The deep thinkers among them quickly speculated that all those judges and politicians who stabbed Trump in the back must have been bought off. But by whom? Suspicion currently centers on China. And if MAGA rumors are correct, China’s treachery is worse than that. Did you know that China has invaded the United States? And not Guam, or some other remote territory, either. No, if the galaxy brain MAGA thinkers are right, the People’s Liberation Army has boots on the ground in Maine.
How could such a thing happen? Blame Canada. Apparently the perfidious French-Canadians are in league with the Chinese, and those miserable poutine eaters have turned Quebec into a staging ground from which units of the People’s Liberation Army can cross into the United States. It’s not clear what China wants with Maine – lobsters, maybe – but presumably they’re installing rigged Dominion voting machines everywhere and leaving a network of 5G towers in their wake. Sherman’s march to the sea pales in comparison. Can sharia law be far behind?
(Speaking of perfidious Canadians, the Q people have figured out that Justin Trudeau is the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro! The beard is a dead giveaway.)
And if all this is news to you, it only proves how widespread the conspiracy is.
Or else – and we can’t overlook this possibility – Trump and his people are idiots. And now, with time running out, the dumbest people left standing are recommending that he stage a coup. Technically, a weird form of autogolpe, but the more common word will do. Whatever else we call it, though, we need to call it illegal.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Donald Trump is a profoundly ignorant man. He has demonstrated time and time again that he has no clue about how American government is supposed to work. But Republicans in Congress know. And they’ve remained silent. Republicans in Congress know abuse of the pardon power when they see it, but they remain silent while Trump pardons war criminals, traitors, and any accomplice who might rat him out. Republicans know what he’s doing. They could stop it if they wanted to. They don’t want to.
In Mary Shelley’s novel, a mad scientist creates a monster, and dies trying to destroy it. In the new Republican reboot of the Frankenstein legend, the monster is the hero of the story. And that angry mob carrying torches and pitchforks? They aren’t after the monster. In the GOP’s FRANKENSTEIN 2020, the mob is coming for you and me. Most of it is performative bluster, but it only takes one well-armed fanatic to get that blood-dimmed time rolling in.