As a child, I loved to visit my grandparents. In addition to the hall closet filled with toys, and the pantry breadbox which invariably hid boxes of animal crackers for us grandchildren, the study had a whole library of books, with an entire shelf of kids’ books at eye level for us. My favorites were the books of fables, myths, and fairy tales, many of which I committed to memory.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that those fables and myths and fairy tales have continued to come to mind as the years have gone on. In the past four years, more than ever, some of them have seemed apt.
I woke up on Nov. 9, 2016, the day after the last presidential election, with the sick feeling that my nightmares of the night before had come true. I had turned in early, before the outcome of the election was clear. I dreamt two dreams, and the first was that a wolf in sheep’s clothing had insinuated himself into a herd, for the sole purpose of feeding his own voracious appetite. And in fact it was true that the candidate who was as dissembling as the day is long had posed as a leader, outspoken and visionary, who cared about many who felt left behind. That so many believed him is more incredible than the fable of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. But then, fact is often much stranger than fiction. As my husband likes to say, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
Most of us realized very early on that this particular man was in love with himself, and needed constant adulation to get through his day. Psychiatrists call it narcissism.
As a child I remember reading the myth of Narcissus, and being sad that someone so beautiful, the son of a river god and a nymph, could only see beauty in himself, and not in the many who fell in love with him. Narcissus was punished for his vanity and coldness. Nemesis, the god of revenge, caused him to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool, then to commit suicide when he realized it was only a reflection. Our narcissist in the White House hasn’t yet faced Nemesis, or at the very least, hasn’t the insight to recognize the emptiness of his vanity.
Our would-be leader inherited a robust economy, an opportunity to meet the climate crisis head-on, and a national reputation for fairness and generosity to build upon. He has treated each of these with the same greedy stupidity as the farmer who owned the goose that laid the golden eggs, who thought that killing the goose would get him all the gold at once. It didn’t work in the fable, and it has failed in disheartening fashion in each instance today.
In the early months of this year, there were clear signs that a global health disaster was in the making. In fact our fearless leader was made well aware of this, but tried to mislead the nation about its severity. His actions were reminiscent of Aesop’s mighty oak that laughed at the humble grasses in the face of an oncoming hurricane. Like the oak, the giant tree of our economy has toppled, and nearly 200,000 citizens have lost their lives.
If the one so desperate to look strong had the humility to speak the truth, and the wisdom to respect science and to remind people that public health takes precedence over individual so-called liberty, we could have been more nimble as a nation, and might be joining together, resilient and flexible as the lowly grasses, to overcome these obstacles.
But the second fairy tale that haunted me in my Election Day nightmare in 2016 was Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” This was the second half of my dream, and still a bad dream for me as we approach the 2020 election.
In the tale, two swindlers come to town and claim to be weavers of a magnificent and remarkable cloth that is invisible to those who are incompetent or stupid. The emperor commissions a grand outfit for his next great procession, but sees nothing on the loom as the weavers go about their labors. His functionaries, likewise, see nothing, but all profess great admiration of the spectacular cloth. For the procession, the weavers dress the emperor in his nonexistent clothes, and he and his functionaries admire them as he sets off. The townspeople are uncomfortable at the spectacle of the unclothed emperor, but say nothing. It takes a child to point out the truth that the emperor is wearing nothing at all.
If this does not suggest the pompous pretender in the White House and his lackeys, Mitch McConnell, Bill Barr, and others, I don’t know what does. It was true when I dreamt it in 2016, and it’s true today.
(Millie LaFontaine of Concord is a retired neurologist.)