WASHINGTON — 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 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.
“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 honour,” until his “frightful catalogue” 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 catalogue 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 Jan. 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.”
(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 couldn’t 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 honour.”
. . .As Bennie Thompson, the chairman 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.
I mean, this isn’t the first time people have noticed this. But it is worth calling out, especially as people keep insisting that sites like Twitter and YouTube should never moderate anything based on “viewpoint discrimination.”
Will literally anyone who has been spewing nonsense about how any of this is about “free speech” admit that maybe they were wrong?
