To The Editor: 

“But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.”

That’s a passage from Edgar Allen Poe’s classic 1842 short story, The Masque of the Red Death. It’s Poe’s sharpest criticism of authoritarian government, and it tells the story of a fictional, Ebola-like plague, which ravages the homeland of the fictional Prince Prospero.          In response, he barricades himself inside his castle with a thousand of his closest cronies, eating, drinking and making merry while his people die.

There’s nothing like a real plague to reveal the depravity of authoritarianism. I recently called our pandemic “The Authoritarian Plague” because if one looks at the authoritarian leaders of the world, their response to the plague has been uniformly awful. All good responses have come from communitarian leaders – bottom up, not top down.  Communitarian leaders say, “Save the women and children first!” Authoritarian leaders say, “Saveme first and to hell with everybody else!” Sic semper tyrannis! We are today’s common folk in an America now run by a narcissistic autocrat, Prince Trumpero, his family and his courtiers. Today’s plague isn’t as lethal as Poe’s Red Death, but it’s the worst virus the world has faced in a century.

Meanwhile, Trumpero and his followers lie, dissemble,and point fingers while people die. Jared Kushner called his father-in-law’s response to COVID-19 “a great success story.” The previous day, our national death toll passed the 58,209 deaths we suffered in the Vietnam War. Prince Trumpero now has presided over the deaths of more Americans than we’ve faced in any war except the Civil War and the two World Wars. We’re more than halfway to the 116,516 deaths of World War I. Don’t bet we won’t pass that figure in the next few months. A few more “success stories” like this and we won’t have a nation left.

Prince Trumpero truly has buckets of innocent blood staining his hands. But does he care? Nah, he always can fly to Mar-a-Lago and host a masquerade ball. But based on the grim ending of Poe’s story, that wouldn’t be smart.  

Rev. Robert Plaisted

Bath and Bridgton