The word wicked grows out of an early form of the root “weg”, meaning to be strong or lively but also to bend or twist. That word travels with “wicca” meaning wizard or witch, one who communes with evil spirits. Now an adverb, it might serve to positively modify an adjective as in “wicked good”, but for our purposes, one who serves the demonic is apt. For example, in a real-world illustration, what Trump and Vance did to Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday, February 28 was wicked, a twisting of truth, and an implied alliance with Putin, the war criminal, who seeks to eliminate a people from the map and from history.
Wicked has the ancient sound, the Biblical ring for an evil that has shown itself in our country, at times, more often than we like to remember, but far more often, we thought, in faraway places. Maybe the word is meant to tear away our blindnesses, to throw open the curtain and reveal the sneering people we have become, perhaps have always been, the ones who are perfectly fine with brutality practiced upon someone else.
I have a good friend, a cinephile and a voracious reader of philosophy and history, who thinks that the most comprehensible way to make sense of the Trump ascendancy and reign is to cast it in the form of a fairy tale.
Every idea has an origin story. Fairy tales may well have begun in pre-literate cultures where stories were the best way to teach children how to behave and an illustration of all the challenges and paths that life may present. Here is how to act and this is what happens if you act against certain rules. Avoid greed and deceit. Practice kindness. Sometimes evil will befall them for no reason, and then they must persevere. Stories lodge rules in the mind.
Where does our fairy tale begin? In our imperial dreams for the continent? In slavery? In Jim Crow? In the extermination of native Americans? In Vietnam, 9/11, the 2008 crash, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Covid, in the invention of the internet? How long have we been building to this moment?
Fairy tales open us to unrealities that mirror reality – magic, rough beasts, mad kings, evil that seems invincible, spells that turn human beings into creatures, curses laid upon the weak and powerless, preternatural meanness, tests, dangerous journeys, a darkness covering the land. Many also promise a hero or heroine who emerges to save the realm – for now, that part of the tale seems very far away and maybe even false in its premise.
Look around today at the magic that turns allies into horrified adversaries, that elevates a ketamine addict, apartheid lover, not so closeted Nazi Wanna-Be into the annihilator of worlds. Look at the humans who clamor to be turned into animals, who yearn for the bridle and bit. Gaze upon the curses laid upon anyone deemed to be an “other”, those suddenly decreed subhuman, a list that grows by the day.
Does the mad King arise from an innocent and morally healthy populace and cast his enchantment over them, a charm that drives half into delusions and which uncovers their long-buried hatreds? Or is he the natural heir to this kingdom’s adoration of money and its ardor for spectacle – that avid longing to always be entertained? Even darker, is this King the apotheosis of his people’s need to punish anyone they are told is an enemy?
Indiscriminate punishment breeds catastrophes. It brutalizes both victims and those who wield the whip. The hubris of those who do the punishing, the sin the Greeks thought the worst, inevitably produces unplanned, unforeseen consequences.
What catastrophes await the Kingdom? Fairy tales offer an array of disasters, both personal and collective: abandoned children, barrier walls of thorns, plagues, men turned into beasts. And today – drones far cheaper than flying monkeys, that record everything and can be outfitted to kill anything; entire groups of people made invisible, made impossible to see as human beings and disappeared into far away camps by ICE-men; measles coming back from the dead; malignant children dispatched into government to wreck individual lives and wreck communities with a code rewrite, with a flick of a switch.
Worse and worse – Fintan O’Toole speculates that Trump, who has called himself a King, wants Greenland for a kind of Fuhrer bunker where the billionaires and their families could retreat from the climate disasters that are inevitable. Think of an Oz larger than Alaska and all it reserved for the most odious beings on the planet. A place far from the dying billions. A place large enough for estates the size of counties and the mineral wealth of Midas to pillage.
Fairy tales scramble what is real. They are by their very definition disorienting. They make opposition to their most destructive magic difficult and dangerous. How does one resist necromancers unbound by law, a pestilence treated with cod liver oil and vitamin supplements, proclamations of such spite and viciousness that they stagger belief and that arrive by the minute on Truth Social, on Fox News, through the multiple podcasts of racists and misogynists.
Kurt Vonnegut’s idea of fairy tales “goes like this: Things start badly and then get a bit better. But then there’s a catastrophe that brings everything to ruin. The story ends with a drastic upheaval in fortunes — a transformation and magical finale — and everyone lives happily ever after.”
Nothing is fated. What will happen is not written. This is not Homeric Greece when the Gods determined everything. Americans have agency. Characters in fairy tales possessed agency. They could choose to trade the cow for the bean or to cut off their heels to fit into the glass slipper. They could choose to allow their children to be led into the forest and left to starve. Americans may choose to vaccinate or not. Seventy-seven million chose to vote for the heel and to applaud all his lies. We are in the middle of this tale’s unwinding, and no one can see the climax and its ending. No hero is promised and no sweet conclusion where the guilty are brought to justice.
When fairy tales intrude upon the actual world, perhaps only natural laws remain, especially Newton’s Third Law and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Newton found that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the best case, evil calls forth goodness. Cruelty calls forth kindness. Hubris calls forth chastisement. Disorder calls forth order.
In the Second Law of Thermodynamics, heat flows toward the cold. Entropy is an inescapable force of nature. Everything runs out of energy. Everything comes to an end, its energy transferred, transformed, reimagined, and no one can predict what that reimagined place will look like. No one can say what will arise from the ashes.
