Eric the Blue

Rediscovered last night how enjoyable watching election returns can be when you approve of the results. “In last year’s presidential election, Donald Trump carried Passaic County, but in tonight’s gubernatorial race it has gone for Democrat Mikie Sherrill by 57 to 42 percent.” Three vials more, please, and some hypodermic needles for the injections.

I have no idea what they were thinking in Passaic County last night, still less what they were thinking a year ago. Maybe a hundred thousand moved away and were replaced by a hundred thousand newbies who had their scheduled tour of the East Wing cancelled. Judging by the voter-in-the-street interviews you see on the news, it could have been almost anything. On the subject of “optics,” for example, I have a particular aversion to the Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago. I don’t think the revelers are students of the book, which is largely a condemnation of Trump’s milieu. Of course one of the leading characters is a competitive golfer about whom the narrator has a sudden recollection:

When we were on a house party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it–and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers–a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal–then died away. A caddy retracted his statement and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.

As if cheating at golf isn’t Trumpian enough, here is probably the novel’s leading rich idiot in conversation:

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard?”

“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

“Well, it’s a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be–will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

And he goes off on a screed. Let’s stop being surprised by their tone.

At Mar-a-Lago, they’re trying to recapture the magic of Gatsby’s parties, where one of the guests, culled from the flock for comment, receives the following notice:

Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face.

The book’s big party comes to the following pitiful conclusion:

Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing gowns and ties, and his shirts piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.

“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher–shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such–such beautiful shirts before.”

Two pages from the end the narrator renders his final judgment:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . .

The Mar-a-Lago crowd loves Gatsby, I suspect, because the sophistication associated with an ability to read is what would allow them to recognize themselves.