There is a lot happening today, and, I am sure, many diaries that are more worthy of attention than another about the uniquely American horror story that is Donald Trump.
But one short scene in last night’s episode prompted me to add this to the record here for the benefit of anyone who does not have the stomach or heart to follow the show.
Just a bit of back story first.
American Horror Story "Cult" opens with the grisly crime scene that was election night, 2016. “Horror Story” veteran Sarah Paulson as “ Allyson Mayfair Richards — Ally”, watches in disbelief as the election returns come in... a chilling re-enactment of the angst visited on us all.
Paulson carries upon her affrighted soul the additional horror of having lodged a protest vote at her Michigan polling place for Jill Stein...so I guess anything that happens to her this season is well deserved.
Not equally guilty and traumatized is the impossibly cute Allison Pill who plays Paulson’s wife and business partner, Ivy. Allison, many will remember, played Maggie Jordon, Jim Harper’s love interest in the late lamented HBO series “Newsroom”.
Ally (not Allison) and Ivy own a restaurant together that they have named “The Butchery on Main Street”, the naming of which, were we viewers present at conception, would have prompted one of those horror film moments where you scream at the clueless protagonist “Don’t open that door, stupid!!!”
“Here’s the Beef” might have inspired more bovine and less human vivisection.
Oh well.
That their marriage survived Ally’s protest vote is testament to Ivy’s inhuman reservoir of forbearance, which sometimes sweetly tolerates her partner’s coulrophobia, lack of managerial skills and dissent into madness.
The two have an adopted son, Oz, the series stand in for all the innocents who had no vote on November the eighth last, and no ruby slippers to whisk them back to Kansas.
The main antagonist, a MAGA addled twenty-something male, is Kai Anderson, sketched in, creepily enough, by Evan Peters.
It is this character’s scene in last night’s show, during which he counsels a fellow deplorable in the art of being despicable enough to worship his drumpfship properly, that prompted this diary.
Seated in a basement room with seance like atmospherics, pinkies entwined to facilitate the flow of deplorable chi one to another, Kai passes on to his troubled acolyte the dark quality shared by all of drumpf’s clan.
“You’re afraid you’re nothing.”
“You’re afraid you’re shit.”
“Stop saying “sorry’!”
“For anything!”
““That” makes you nothing.”
“Everything is somebody else’s fault from now on.”
“You want to be somebody?”
“You want to matter?”
“Then, you make the world wrong.”
Nine lines that encapsulate the core of America’s Horror Story.