Until 2016 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a book of fiction. We woke up in November, 2016 and found ourselves in the thick of the book’s madness with the Queen of Hearts/Trump screaming, “Off with their heads.”
We recognized the similarity between Trump and Lewis Carroll’s Queen who is a “blind fury,” a foul-mouthed, ill-tempered, irrational monarch; madness came to dwell in the White House. The Republicans supported, aided and abetted it.
For four years we have been in the grips of daily assaults on our sanity by the Queen of Hearts/Donald Trump. She/he has upped the nasty game to provoke and invoke the demons of xenophobia, of racism, of shaming, of mocking and of mouth-fouled misogyny.
In case the realists among us would like to make distinctions between the danger Alice faced and ourselves, between the Queen of Hearts and Donald Trump between literature and life, it’s too late. Trump has already destroyed any borders between fact and fiction.
We have been in some profound sense in “Alice in Wonderland,” feeling trapped in a Trump madness of a very confusing narrative in which nothing made sense and everything was crazy making. Trump has been telling us, daily and repeatedly, that wrong is right, that fact is fiction that science is junk that narcissism is patriotism that what he said about sexual assault on women is normal male talk.
Now we have had an election. Joe Biden is the elected President and Kamala Harris the elected Vice President. Any reader would recognize that the terrorizing Queen of Hearts/Trump has been defeated. We knew that it would not be an easy ending, despots are hard to dislodge even in democratic elections. So far, the Republicans have not accepted the elections results. There is a lesson we could take from Alice in Wonderland. It’s time to stop falling into a rabbit-hole in which Republicans now, like Alice in the book must constantly change their size, their ethics, democratic values, and decency. The Republican Party itself dug the rabbit-hole; Trump just excavated it to a new low.
We are now in the grip of a severe pandemic. Every day that passes with Trump resistance to recognize his defeat has tragic consequences. President-elect Biden has a team ready to tackle Covid-19 and save thousands of lives. Trump refuses.
So for the next two months, given the ridiculously inordinate transition time, we still have to live in Trump’s looking-glass world, and can’t wait for the day when we can fully step back into reality. The damage will be lasting, and he has warped American democracy, though, we hope, not irremediably. We shall have to see. The recovery may be long, prolonged, and difficult, and Democratic losses will only complicate matters further. And of course, getting rid of Trump is not the same as getting rid of Trumpism. We still don’t know the full scope of the damage, domestically and internationally the world of folly of the Queen of Hearts has wreaked on us.
What is beyond doubt is that Trump and the likes of him must never again become president of this country. There are some harsh lessons from these curious and curiouser years. No more comparisons of the two parties to Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Let’s fight like hell to elect two senators from Georgia. Let us, like the white rabbit, pull out our pocket watches, realize how late the hour is, and get to work.
And let us click here to support the Georgia Senate candidates