18 May 2017

Burn the Witch!

Somewhere — perhaps in the White House, more likely on one of his other properties where he can visit it frequently to engage in the kind of narcissistic self-reflection we've come to expect of him — there's a picture of Donald J. Trump. It's a magical-realist picture, in the same vein as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and perhaps more to the point Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde? I hear you ask. What does he have to do with South American magical realism, with its archly political context? There's a simple answer: The Picture of Dorian Gray. It, too, is archly political in the same kind of personal sense as are One Hundred Years of Solitude or Midnight's Children or any of the other recognized core works in twentieth century magical realism. Indeed, there's a very good argument that the real ancestor of magical realism is Voltaire… but that's just a bit too tangential for the moment.

My point is that the Picture of Donald J. Trump is a witch who spews forth defectively-spelled curses. And he should be afforded all of the due process from being accused of witchcraft himself that he would afford the modern-day witch: Immigrants from nations that sometimes produce terrorists… on the basis of their immigrant status, because he has no intention whatsoever of applying any of this to native-born white 'murikans. Like Timothy McVeigh.

At this stage, I'll light the first torch, using a copy of The Art of the Deal for something more useful than its contents: Tinder. And spell the prominent English family name "Grey" correctly, in contrast to Wilde (in his futile effort to avoid libel proceedings)…