Teen Sleuth Haunted Library

What fiction writer – if any – could have conceived of Sarah Palin without completely blowing the boundaries of reality? Dickens? Shakespeare? Ruth Rendell? In children’s fiction, maybe, where a parodic lunatic still has its place. It’s not really in grown-up literatures nature to have stone cold villains, coal-black embodiments of evil. Serious literature has no shortage of killers, molesters, kidnappers, cannibals, misanthropes, black widows, bloodsuckers, pederasts and politicans…and there are plenty of literary counterparts to modern assholes (change Italy to Iraq in Catch-22, and Milo is Dick Cheney and Colonel Cathcart is George W), but of the snidleliest whiplashes ever to have bound sweet damsel to train track, has any serious writer of novels ever conjured up a sub-literate rube from a weird, frozen tundra, a vicious “hockey mom” to 5 terrible children who shoots wolves from helicopters? Or a character as farcical as “Anne Coulter”, or as grotesque as Roger Ailes?

Claudius from Hamlet by William Shakespeare and Chris Christie

Heavy is the head that wears the crown indeed. When we first see King Hamlet’s brother Claudius, he seems a well-spoken and capable ruler. He gives speeches that makes his court and country proud. When King Hamlet is killed, the people unite behind a collective suffering. Claudius diplomatically avoids war with Norway, and is respected as a leader who can take immediate and decisive action in a crisis. In private, however, King Claudius is a villain of cartoonish proportions who Hamlet’s Ghost refers to as an “incestuous, adulterate beast”, and we soon realize that Claudius is what is “rotten in the state of Denmark.” Claudius and his corrupt court bask in their power, representing the worst in human nature — ambition, lust, corruption, and excess. Morally weak, Claudis swaps his humanity for political power and and some stuff. He denies Rozencrantz and Guildenstern the knowledge of the contents of the letter to England  that would have saved their lives. He lets Gertrude drink the poison in the goblet so as not to implicate himself in the insidious plot (#Gobletgate). His sure fire plan to deal with young Hamlet completely unravels when Laertes confesses.

Considering Chris Christie’s long track record of petty revenge against his perceived enemies, and that an old lady died as an indirect result of #Bridgeghazi, he ventures into Shakespearian Villain territory. Cartoonishly large and emotive, Christie is an effective stump politician and a formidably effective communicator, famous for making the complex seem deceptively simple as well as for his withering put-downs of public service unions. Until the unravelling of #Bridgegate, Christie was arguably the most popular politician in America and a rare figure of bipartisanmanship in a party monopolized by psychopathic ideologues and Teabaggers. His public bromance with the President, wearing matching windbreakers in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, appealed to those weary of polarized politics.

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