COVID-19: OUR MODERN MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

“I want to see the economy opened up and raring to go by Easter…it would be a beautiful time line…Easter is a very special day for me… and you’ll have packed churches all over our country.” -Donald J Trump, 25 March 2020

In Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Masque Of The Red Death’, the land ruled over by Prince Prospero has lost a full half its population to a plague known as the Red Death. So Prospero chooses a thousand of his closest friends, and holes up in one of his ‘castellated abbeys’, the doors welded shut to keep the virus, and those who might spread it, out. Within, as Poe explains, “The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.” It was, in other words, a veritable Mar-A-Lago.

It was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm…There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.

Look at the photos of Trump, America’s own Prince Prosperous (‘the strongest economy ever’) signing the Coronavirus relief bill, surrounded by his courtiers in the Oval Office. Watch every press briefing, where Trump lines up…