Editor’s note: This commentary is by Morgan Coutts Irons, of Calais, who is a native Vermonter and actor and previously the children’s librarian at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier, a scholar for the Vermont Humanities Council, and a teacher in Vermont’s correctional facilities.
“The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.”
So opens Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 tale, “The Masque of the Red Death.” I was reminded of this gruesome story in early May when the media broke the news that one of Donald Trump’s personal valets had tested positive for the highly contagious and potentially deadly novel coronavirus. A mysterious masked and cloaked stranger, a viral threat with no tangible body, had breached the White House gates, and shortly the intruder breathed on the vice president’s press secretary as well.
But things move more slowly in modern-day Washington than in a six-page short story. Poe’s silent intruder accomplished his mission of destruction within an hour of his midnight appearance at the Prince’s masquerade ball; but it wasn’t until late July that Trump’s national security adviser contracted Covid-19, and much later, in early October when the president’s close counselor Hope Hicks did likewise. (All these cases were first reported by a vigilant press, by the way, and only later acknowledged by the White House, begging the question of how many inner circle infections went unreported.)
In Poe’s story the Red Death had ravaged the country, bringing a horrible and almost instantaneous death to its victims; half the populace had died. For his own protection the callous Prince sequesters himself inside “one of his castellated abbeys” with a throng of his ardent followers. Here the chosen could enjoy themselves and “bid defiance to contagion … the external world could take care of itself.” Poe’s leader, like our own, was indifferent to the sufferings of the population at large.
The Prince’s abbey calls to mind the White House, an enclosed and protected space, with lofty walls and gates of iron; yet the contagion, a stranger “shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave” and wearing the mask “of a stiffened corpse,” managed to sneak inside both buildings. Control, Poe warned us, is an illusion.
One of Trump’s last outings before the national March lockdown was a dinner party at Mar-a-Lago attended by a number of people who soon tested positive for the virus, but the president, like the Prince before his own lockdown, had thus far escaped the contagion.
Trump, of course, did not stay sequestered for long. The Prince brought his admirers with him when he sheltered in place, but Trump needed to go out into the world to receive the adulation he craves from crowds of his adherents. On May 5, after complaining that he had not left the White House in months, he resumed his travels, beginning in Arizona.
Unwilling to acknowledge his failure to check the virus stalking the nation, Trump gave no thought to comforting citizens who had lost loved ones. As for the Prince and his followers, “it was folly to grieve, or to think.”
Trump’s flaunting of protective measures may have sprung from a delusion of invincibility. Perhaps the Prince, this “bold and robust man,” had the same delusion when he eventually drew his dagger to confront the deadly masked stranger, filled with anger and shame for showing weakness, a “momentary cowardice,” before his followers. But the Prince never struck – the Red Death leveled him instantaneously through no visible means. Finally moved to action, the revelers tear at the stranger’s cloak and mask, only to find them “untenanted by any tangible form.” They fall one by one, and “the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
Today the silent intruder whose power Trump has so long sought to deny, the intruder that again sneaked into the White House, has breathed on the president himself and many in his inner circle. When the Prince came face to face with his masked opponent he flashed his dagger in an act of defiance. “Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery?” he had cried to his followers. Now Trump has come face to face with his own nemesis, and in his own act of defiance flashed a tweet: “Don’t be afraid of Covid.”
The president and those in his inner circle will likely be much luckier that Poe’s ill-fated Prince and his followers, much luckier than the thousands and thousands of Americans who succumbed to the virus early on when less was known about how to treat it, much luckier than the vast number of us whose health care is subpar or non-existent. Today’s elites have the resources to deflect Covid, but many of us in the real world do not. But hey, “bid defiance to contagion … the external world [can] take care of itself,” right?
