On Nov. 3, 1961, “The Twilight Zone” aired a landmark episode, “It’s a Good Life,” based on a short story by Jerome Bixby, starring Billy Mumy as 6-year-old Anthony Fremont, a petulant, tyrannical child-monster with godlike powers. The residents of Peaksville, the only town left on the planet because Anthony has “disappeared” the rest of the world, are terrified of him, constantly lavishing him with fawning, undeserved praise, telling him everything he does is “good” because he disfigures and erases anyone who displeases him with a mere thought, exiling them to a terrifying nowhere, a “cornfield” from which there is no return. Because he can’t be disciplined and is a perfect sociopath, Anthony brooks no argument that his actions are wrong. Whatever he thinks or does is, by definition, “right.”
“It’s a Good Life” is a fitting allegory for today’s White House and Republican lawmakers, Trump sycophants and parasites praising their tyrannical, mercurial child-monster, not daring to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, living in fear of his capricious wrath if he’s displeased. His latest Press Secretary, Kayleigh MacEnany? MAGAninny? (of the infamous, “I will never lie to you” statement to the Press Corps, her first of hundreds of lies to the Press Corps) has proclaimed (for Audience One to consume on Faux News) Trump is the “… the most informed person on planet earth …”, apparently immune to the jaw-clenching, teeth-gnashing stupidity of using this particular lie to explain why the president WASN’T informed about Russia’s arrangement to pay a bounty to the Taliban for killing US troops.
Whether Trump and his apologists are lying (unacceptable) or Trump actually wasn’t informed of Russia’s Kill-A-US-Soldier bounty (unacceptable) or he wasn’t informed because his servile boot-kissers were terrified of joining their predecessors in his Twitter cornfield (unacceptable) or his hand-picked intelligence apparatus was too incompetent to uncover what the press was able to (also unacceptable) is now irrelevant. What IS relevant is that, despite the fact that he claims not to have known THEN, he knows NOW — and has done and said — nothing! (New campaign tagline alert: MRGA! Make Russia Great Again!)
There is no comfort in Kayleigh M.’s equally vapid lie that the president “reads.” Really? The president reads? “Why, isn’t that special? Does he know his numbers and alphabet, too? What a good little president! How is he with ramps and sippy-glasses? Oh, dear — behind the class in those areas?” Of course the evidence in support of the “he reads” lie is non-existent, every photo of Dear Reader, his tiny Russia-apologist doll-hands clenched in front of him as he malingers behind the Resolute desk (Time for a new name — the Desolate? The Dissolute?) exposing it as a paper-free, intelligence-free zone. Then there are his frequent, “only-person-on-earth-who-believes-this” pronouncements that COVID-19 will disappear “like magic.” He reads? Sure.
Are we to believe that President Sharpie Weatherman “consumes intelligence” at such a pace that an army of aides can’t deliver it faster than he “consumes” it, nary a paper waiting to be read on a desktop as vacant as his thoughts, empty as his heart? Where would he find the time, between hours spent daily watching Fox News, weekends golfing, texting with Putin, poorly attended rallies, and canoodling with Hannity via unsecured phone each evening?
I can only hope that this amoral phantasm of a terrified, terrifying child, this narcissistic Russian puppet, is banished on Nov. 3 to a frightening political nowhere from which there’s no hope of return, accompanied forever by his Republican enablers and remoras, the last thing he “reads” as he’s led out of the White House and helped down a ramp to his waiting limo to be disappeared to his new dacha by the Black Sea a headline proclaiming, “Biden wins historic landslide! Many people say biggest landslide ever on Planet Earth!”
Perhaps then we’ll be permitted to return as a country from this cornfield in the “Twilight of Democracy Zone” that Trump has delivered all of us to, where the only thing that matters is pleasing this petulant narcissist, abuser of power he neither understands nor deserves to wield, lying all the while about those abuses. You need more to read, President Evelyn Wood? Read this.
Gary Greene is a resident of Greenfield.