There they were, the first family of the United States, gussied up — with one tennis-ball green exception — in basic black, clashing with the red, white and blue backdrop and looking for all the world like a group ready for a New York cocktail party to which they’d never be invited. There’s a metaphor or two in there somewhere.
A poster to a New York Times article said they looked like a contemporary Addams Family, minus the kindness and the humor. Like Eugene O’Neill’s Electra (more on her in a bit), mourning becomes them.
Given the Republican Convention’s lack of substance — there was no platform behind the country’s a mess and that’s why you need four more years of President Donald J. Trump, begging the question of what he’s been doing the past four years — the viewer was left to concentrate on style, or what passed for style. The vituperative rhetoric, the lunatic shouting, the split ends: The whole thing made Sarah Palin look like Margaret Chase Smith.
You didn’t need to read excerpts from Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s “Melania and Me,” out Tuesday, Sept. 1, to know that Melania and Ivanka Trump aren’t besties. The day-glo death stare that emitted from Melania’s eyes after Ivanka finished her speech and crossed in front of her said it all. Even a sphinx is not-so-inscrutable at times, particularly when she knows she’s overmatched. Another Times poster pointed out that in a battle between the Donald’s chief women — my how a narcissist loves chaos — the daughter will always win. Of course, because that’s typical of a man’s ego. A man can make a daughter, but no man can actually create a wife. Trump has had a longer relationship with Ivanka than with any of his wives individually. She’s the yin to his yang, the female of himself.
I used to think that Ivanka was Trump’s Athena. Indeed, I’ve even written so on this blog. The Athenians, in choosing a goddess for patronage over a god (her tempestuous uncle, Poseidon), made sure they picked one who identified with the male principle. The ultimate Daddy’s Girl, Athena sprang full-blown from the head of Zeus, who had swallowed her mother — Metis, goddess of wisdom — to avoid the prophecy that said Metis would give birth to a son greater than Zeus himself. Problem solved. Athena, goddess of wisdom, arts and crafts and war in a just cause, would uphold the patriarchy — bucking up heroes like Achilles and Odysseus in “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” where she’s on the opposite side of her stepmother, Hera; and casting the deciding vote in favor of Orestes at his trial for matricide. (You’ll remember that Orestes killed his mother, Clytemnestra, for murdering his father, Agamemnon, at the behest of his sister, Electra, another Daddy’s Girl.)
The enforcing Ivanka’s more of an all-too-mortal Electra with a touch of Eva Perón. Just don’t cry for her, Argentina.