Literary Corner: Essay on Criticism

Drawing by JaysonZHahn/Medium.

 

Trump finally explained the Hannibal Lecter bit, and it's worse than you think.

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— Comfortably Numb (@numb.comfortab.ly) Sep 7, 2024 at 6:10 PM

The Poet Defends Himself Against His Critics

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

AND THEN THE PRESS WHEN I SAY DR HANNIBAL LECTER.
THE PRESS SAYS, OH, WHY DID HE MENTION THAT?
THEY ARE WISE GUYS BACK THERE? JUST WISE GUYS. THEY SAY
HE RAMBLED AND STARTED TALKING ABOUT
HANNIBAL LECTER. WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO?

THAT'S A REPRESENTATIVE OF PEOPLE THAT ARE
COMING INTO OUR COUNTRY. DR HANNIBAL LECTER,
HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER. YOU KNOW THAT
HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER. NO, BUT THIS
IS WHAT'S HAPPENED. THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENING AT LEVELS
THAT NOBODY CAN EVEN IMAGINE. MILLIONS AND MILLIONS.

I love how the critics speak mostly in an easy dactylic pentameter in the first five lines, before Trump responds in his own choppily unmetered voice.

Dr. Lecter is just what your fancy-ass literature professors refer to as a metaphor. That is, not a "representative" like your congressman but a symbolic representation, of the millions and millions of Latin American lunatics, mental patients like Dr. Lecter, driven by their governments from the asylums of their own benighted countries and pushed to cross from Mexico into the USA to find asylums here. The liberals even admit this!

Not that they're really cannibals, exactly, that's a metaphor too, though they really are criminals. It means their rapacious consumption of all the generous benefits we give them is eating our lunch.* 

And finally, like Dr. Lecter, they don't exist, just like the benefits we don't give them. Their existence isn't the point! This is literature, people! The point is the emotions they give us! 

"True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story."

He's not rambling at all! He's weaving! As the fancy-ass literature professors in his own circle have told him.

*I think Hannibal's joke, the play on the ambiguity of "have for dinner", may be the first and even only piece of purely verbal humor Trump has ever understood, his first or only experience of what it's like to "get" it. That's surely why he's compelled to keep repeating it, in every speech.