"Even as Trump tries to paint Joe Biden as gaga, he is doing something truly gaga: He is running the government that is responding to the worst pandemic in a century..."

"... at the same time he is the leader of the resistance to his own government, urging people and states to open up whenever they see fit, recommending Clorox injections, stifling Dr. Fauci, refusing to wear the mask. The fact is that Donald Trump has been wearing a mask for a long time, like Eleanor Rigby 'wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door.' He studied larger-than-life titans like George Steinbrenner and Lee Iacocca and invented a swaggering character called Donald Trump with a career marked by evasions, deceptions and disguises. The young builder was intent, as T.S. Eliot wrote, to take the time 'to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.'"

Writes Maureen Dowd in "Covid Dreams, Trump Nightmares/Of masks, unmasking and dropping our professional masks for our medical ones" (NYT).

Okay. So... The Beatles...



"Eleanor Rigby" calls on us to feel empathy for "all the lonely people," but Dowd invokes it to sneer at a man.

Who does not wear a mask — a face that we keep in the jar by the door? How sad it is! Where's the love? But to Dowd, because it's Trump, we are called to hate, not love. A man has a persona as he faces the world, but who is he really? Because it's Trump, that isn't a call to empathy, but a basis for shunning and contempt and disgust — the kind of feeling that made Hillary say "basket of deplorables." The basket, the jar... the dehumanizing.

Here's a better "jar" song to suit the Dowdian mood...



The jar is under the bed...

And let's get the rest of the T.S. Eliot quote. It's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Please carefully read the entire poem and contemplate the extent to which Trump is anything like Prufrock, but let me expedite the process by quoting Wikipedia:

Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature.

Well, that does not sound like Trump at all!  Unattained carnal love? It sounds like a list of things Trump doesn't feel — "weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay." If anything, it's what he makes other people feel. It's one hell of a mask, if what we're seeing is merely a mask and the real Trump is all Prufrocky.

More likely Dowd is just playing around with the nifty bits and pieces that float by in her highly fluid consciousness. Thanks for the quotes, Maureen. They were very bloggy. The Beatles and T.S. Eliot...

...fighting in the captain's tower, while calypso singers laugh at them, and fishermen hold flowers.