Melania Trump’s little tree of illiteracy
The American hard-right devaluing of education is an extraordinary thing to watch. I am staring at Melania Trump’s White House Christmas Book Tree, which is a small revolving pyramid of books bought solely for their green covers.
From World of Golf to William E. Donoghue’s Lifetime Financial Planner with Dana Shilling — if you bought it in 1986, you must be rich now — they were picked out of a bin and selected for hardness and greenery like unripe supermarket bananas. There’s one good book in the tree, FDR’s own copy of A Christmas Carol, but it was also chosen for colour. It is red.
Books are good, except when they are not. As with bananas and avocados, it takes study, practice and squeezing to choose the suitable ones. An arts degree can be directed to any good purpose, teaching both cognitive and emotional intelligence, preparing you for any job that requires writing, reading, assessing or even speaking up in meetings.
I remember a Catholic university once cancelling a speech I was asked to give on the value of a liberal arts degree because donors were irate. Why does it have to be “liberal,” one complained. Why not “conservative?” I bowed out, mostly because I frighten easily but really, isn’t it self-evident that a history degree might be useful in this appalling era?
Arts degrees provide that essential thing, context. They offer art that mirrors the world. They give you the summary, the apt quotation.
Melania Trump doesn’t know that her eerie Christmas decor looks like the Hundred-Year Winter in Narnia — but not in a good way — and the flickering tunnel of looming white stalks in the East Colonnade would terrify even the Children of the Corn.
Like her husband, she does not read, neither rattlingly good horror novels nor C.S. Lewis, which is partly how her decorator pulled a fast one.
The value of a literature degree — its daily utility rather than theoretical value — lies in the fact that everything you hear or see has a parallel in fiction.
It’s a living analogy-generator, a flashing signal when you meet greasy manipulators (Uriah Heep, you think to yourself) or a comfort in dark times. Miserable people might find assistance in the King James Bible, which is really a tale of woe, with some delicious bits and numinous moments.
Fiction is all about immersion, a means of entering the lives of others, which would be self-help for racists.
I have a taste for novels with interludes of intense boredom. Try Henry James or David Foster Wallace for the spray of relief and beauty after a hundred pages of mud.
You are not Winterbourne in Daisy Miller, turning your back on a beautiful happy young woman the way Prince Charles turned on Diana.
You are not a tax assessor in The Pale King, with claustrophobia and a terrible sweat problem.
And you thought I wouldn’t get to Shakespeare. Reading him is hard work, and those who say he shouldn’t be taught in high school did not manage that work.
Those who complain they can’t relate to him are wrong; there’s no writer who can match him in sourcing the struggling human, the bestial, the amoral, the clueless. He’s a hurdle but once you’ve cleared him ...
Is Trump a wailing King Lear or a blithering Polonius or an idiotic Bottom? Which Trump courtier is Caliban?
Which Atwood novel are you living through right now, The Handmaid’s Tale or Cat’s Eye? If your life is We Need to Talk About Kevin, are you Kevin? Are you Stan and Charmaine, living in a car in End Times in The Heart Goes Last and will you take a job as an executioner and sex slave to get a decent shower?
As journalism fails to cope, the blast of bad news wears us down and famous men are revealed as scary monsters and supercreeps, it’s rewarding to live a fictional life, alone with the contents of my head. A university degree in English gave me this. It has never let me down.