No one who has read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ever forgets the images of Victor Frankenstein combing the charnel houses for body parts–this is one of the top ten literary scenes of the past two hundred years along with the sinking of Melville’s whaling ship. Shelley writes in Victor’s voice:
“Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me –a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.”
By way of a strict analogy the Republicans in the House and Senate are equally fascinated by the body parts of the U.S. economy–and like Victor they can’t conceive of the pieces as anything that’s deserving of what we might call a holistic vision. having killed the damned thing with malice aforethought, for indeed the whole plan from Reagan onward has been to eliminate the middle class and return us to the 1870’s–the GOP is now fingering the disfigured “bits” and arguing that if they could have just a little more time they could prove their vision for America.
God Almighty! You’d think that having destroyed the greatest economic engine in the history of the world in a comparatively brief quarter century would bring just one Republican House member or one Senator “up short” but the lesson of “Frankenstein” is that a vision that’s driven by abstraction rather than a pragmatic concern for community is its own reward and its owner shall possess no dramatic irony. They hold up the wormy feet and the severed hands and denounce any spending that might put some blood back in the veins of the American worker or families. The heartlessness of their rhetoric is the most astonishing thing of all.
Astonishing unless you see them at last for what they are. They are little Victor Frankensteins with no shame or hope of feeling.
I was mindful of these thoughts when I saw that Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snow decided to get out of the Charnel House and wash their hands.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 