In the United States of Amnesia, where we learn nothing because we remember nothing, we need to grant ourselves amnesty before we gift it to others. We need to know why we have sinned before we can receive absolution for our sins of omission and commission; for our inadvertent displays of ignorance and our inexcusable acts of stupidity; for our failure to read history and our willful decision to rewrite it by libeling our opponents as enemies and labeling our newly classified enemies as terrorists. Let us offer Charles Blow of the New York Times the same forgiveness, because while he knows not what he does, he knows damn well what he says—he damns Melania Trump as the commander in chief’s teammate in terror.
To read Blow’s column is to enter more of a wormhole than a rabbit hole. It is, rather, a black hole—in black-and-white print—in which truth collapses and context tears itself apart.
It is, if you will pardon my conflation of the mammalian with the matter of matter itself, a realm madder than any madhouse of the Mad Hatter. It is, as far as I can tell, a descent into Communist Romania, with Mrs. Trump cast as Elena Ceaușescu: the “First Lady” of a prison state in which legions were shot and killed until there were not enough bullets to stop the legions in the streets; until, in contravention of her orders and Soviet Russia’s refusal to intervene and stop the disorder, she was executed alongside her husband. In the end, there were more than enough bullets to kill this evil woman.
Is this to be Melania Trump’s end, too, even though she was born in Yugoslavia, a speaker of Slovene instead of a Slovak-speaking native of Bucharest? Is this to be her fate as a terrorist and enemy combatant, given her aversion to politics and her protection of her only son?
Charles Blow has already stabbed Mrs. Trump with his sword of a pen. Perhaps nothing will satisfy him until the mob says: Off with her head!