The Face Masque of the Red Death

From The Washington Post today:

As U.S. discouraged mask use for public, White House team raced to secure face coverings from Taiwan for senior staff

From Edgar Allen Poe, 178 years ago (with emphasis added):

The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.

But 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 crenellated 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 nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. 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. 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."...

I've been nudged by several of you about applying this Poe story to our present condition, because you all know I'm a Poe guy and because I have used Red Death as a metaphor for Republican and Beltway Media imperial indifference to the real world suffering of real people many times.

But I decided to wait, assuming that Trump's Horrendous Clusterfuck Administration would eventually provide a grotesquely perfect, one-to-one match.

And of course they did.

Behold, a Tip Jar!