Meanwhile, at Camp David

Prince Dubya makes merry with the Party Faithful.

There is something brutally contemporary in the best of Poe’s work, and since 'tis the season...

It’s true that he cranked out a lot of crap (don't we all), but it is also true that 150 years after his death, his C. Auguste Dupin is still the prototype for every private detective from Sherlock to Monk.

His nameless psychopath who was “…never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him” would be right at home in the box spilling his guts on any of the thousands of “Law and Order” variants.

Montresor’s crime scene – undisturbed for fifty years – would fit in nicely as either a “Cold Case” or perhaps “CSI: Italy”.

And his “Masque of the Red Death" feels to me more frighteningly modern every day.

Set in an unnamed land wracked by plague and fear…

“The "Red Death" had long devastated the country.
No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.

The wealthy -- under the leadership of their Prince Prospero -- withdraw into a massive fortress:

"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.

"This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned."

And in three, quick lines, Poe almost offhandedly distills the essence of all feudal systems and deftly defines the nature of the New Conservative Order the Party of God is now openly struggling to impose on our country.

"With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion.

"The external world could take care of itself.

"In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. "

Because the promise you are being offered here and now is this: As long as you are obedient to the Prince, you will be protected from the horror of Outside.

The horror of black men laying their hands on your white women.

The horror of Poverty.

Of Sickness.

Terrorists.

Dirty hippies.

Nukes.

Democrats.

Burning Flags.

Liberals.

Jews.

Strong women.

Messicans.

Nuptialized Queers.

It’s a long and ever-growing list.

As long as you calibrate your tunnel vision narrower and narrower until all you see is Fox, all you hear is Rush and all you believe is literal and inerrant word of Dubya H. Christ…you will be protected from the Evil Other that lurks Out There.

In fact far from a call to shared sacrifice and purpose, it’ll be one helluva party!:

The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure.

There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.

All these and security were within.

Without was the "Red Death."

It is the perfect Conservative Cartesian Universe, with a clear, bright line drawn with a Flag and a Bible between Us and Them.

Until, of course, the revelers realize, too late, that the outside world can’t be walled off and shut out.

That as much perfume and bunting and forest-green stucco as they try to slather and tack and trowel on the walls, the only enduring human structures designed to keep the world permanently out and us in are Tombs and Prisons.

And the only Peace and Security this regime is offering are those of the Gulag and the Grave.

Because in the end, the world endures and fixed fortifications do not, and we can either go out and meet the threats of our era – and home and abroad -- with confidence, compassion, strength, humor, flexibility and intelligence…or hunker in our bunker getting dumber and drunker and pretending it’ll all just go away and leave us alone.

In the end we cannot hide.

Even if we were itty bitty we couldn’t hide, but we are far too big, too rich, too prominent and too powerful to even pretend such a thing is possible or desirable. We are all in this together, and if we allow ourselves to be scared into cowering in our fortress of fear and ignorance we doom ourselves.

The Outside will always, always breach the walls.

Red Death always will come for us in our resplendent spider hole…

“…like a thief in the night.

And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.

"And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired.

"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."