I waited until the last minute to purchase my Halloween costume and wouldn’t you know it? By the time I got to my local Spirit Halloween (which, until the month before had been the Department of Education), they were all sold out of “Heartless Plutocrat” tuxedo onesies.
“What gives?” I asked the employee, who used to run USAID.
“The Mar-A-Lago crowd bought ‘em all up for Trump’s Great Gatsby party,” he said.
Obviously, I thought, the fellow was having a laugh at my expense. Surely even this president knows better than to throw a Roaring Twenties-themed gala the day before the federal government shuts 42 million Americans out of their SNAP benefits? Or right before insurance companies jack up their prices because the health insurance marketplace subsidies expired with the budget. Any sane politician, no matter how odious, would put the kibosh on such a party at this moment of maximal anxiety for everyday Americans.
And yet here we are, bystanders to the MAGA party to end all parties, poolside at a Mar-A-Lago festooned with feathers brought in by the kilo. Look, there’s Marco Rubio whose agency is destroying America’s global standing – doesn’t he look smart? And by golly, was that Capitol bigwig Jeanine Pirro squeezed into an emerald green number with the whoosit in her hair standing beside what appears to be a burlesque dancer in a human-sized martini glass? Why yes it is!
This president may not win the Nobel Peace Prize anytime soon, but if they’re handing them out for tone deafness, he’s got my vote.
I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t read The Great Gatsby until I was well into my roaring forties. Maybe it was better that I waited. As a high schooler or young adult, I wouldn’t have grasped the hollowness at the book’s core; in the excesses of the age of consumerism, why care who, or what, you hurt when all things are no more than objects to be replaced when they grow worn?
I know the Trump crowd isn’t big on reading either, but how is it possible that nobody on the party planning committee put up a finger of caution to mention that the optics of such an event might not translate well to an American public worried about getting kidnapped off the street by agents of the federal government? Or when, say, the cost of whatever limp, overcooked meat the president’s guests found on their plates that evening would probably cover monthly SNAP benefits for a family of four?
Who am I kidding—not only is it possible, it’s certain. Because with this administration, it’s not enough to implement cruelty as a governing strategy. One has to then rub that cruelty in the faces of those subject to the worst excesses. When we say the cruelty is the point, that’s only half true. The other half is the troll.
Because the truth is, just like Jay Gatsby, Tom, Daisy and the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, these are people who attended the best schools, rubbed elbows with the best sort of crowd, cracked the bawdiest jokes on the greenest fairways, their laughs compounding like interest as they echoed across the golf course. People who didn’t The Great Gatsby, yes, but maybe skimmed the Cliff Notes or watched the movie and found the premise aspirational. These are people for whom “being seen” does not mean being understood, only being envied.
What themes must they have rejected before settling on Gatsby? They’ve already brought Versailles to the East Wing, but what about a “Celebrating Hurricane Katrina” theme? Are are they saving “Nuremburg” for next year?
How does one even joke about this stuff? Satirists across the nation must have been despondent after seeing photos from the frightfest, the pretty girls in flapper costumes sprinkled among the club’s usual denizens whose lip implants, boob jobs, and cheek fillers are enough to frighten children even on non-trick-or-treating days. What is even left to lampoon when no amount of hyperbole could approach the garishness of an American currently bulldozing the White House, and who spent much of the last week congratulating himself on remodeling the Lincoln Bedroom sh-tter while Border Patrol was tear gassing a Chicago Halloween parade?
There’s a new movie out called Ballad of a Small Player, in which Colin Farrell plays a down-on-his-luck gambler stranded in Macau during the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. While trying to rustle up some money to get back in the game, he hits up an old friend who tells him that the Chinese have an expression: “Dead to shame.” It describes a certain kind of person who has lowered themselves so far that they’ve become inured to guilt. Inured to even having a conscience. In the movie, those people are congregated in Macau’s casinos. In The Great Gatsby, they’re at West Egg. Although we have many such places in America, the epicenter of the American hungry ghost is currently known as Mar-A-Lago.
What makes Fitzgerald’s book a tragedy rather than satire is that Gatsby, the book’s antihero, created his own legend for the sake of love. Trump has no such excuse. He is what happens when the unexamined life remains unexamined. The perfidy, mendaciousness, self-aggrandizement, the casual meanness and excesses.
The book ends with Gatsby’s sparsely-attended funeral. Nick Carraway is there, along with a few gawkers and hangers-on still unwilling to admit the party is over. One gets the sense that Gatsby will not be missed, that his time as a great, glittering beacon flashing across the Long Island Sound was flitting and inconsequential. Just like the man himself.
What a frightful thought that must be for so many people, such as, one would imagine, attending the night’s festivities. Including, perhaps, the man of honor himself. Huh. Just look at the response among MAGA faithful following Democrat successes last night in elections across the country—perhaps not a funereal moment for the White House, but a portentous chill in the fall air.
Maybe the theme was more fitting for a Halloween party than I originally thought.
The post Opinion: Sorry, But I’m Never Going to Stop Talking About Trump’s Perfectly Grotesque ‘Gatsby’ Party appeared first on The Daily Beast.
