To paraphrase Lemony Snicket, I would advise all (ten) of our readers to turn away from this story and read something more pleasant instead.
You see, I recently finished watching the new Netflix series based on A Series of Unfortunate Events, a series of books that I devoured (not literally) as a child. This series had a not insignificant impact on my childhood–I loved them enough to convince my parents to get me the unheralded video game by the same name as a reward for getting my braces off. (Hey, my older brother got a city-building game named Zeus when he got his braces off, so it seemed like a fair ask).
As I fell headfirst into the nostalgia of the Baudelaires and Count Olaf–not to be mistaken with my alma mater, St. Olaf–I immediately began to inevitably view the show through a political lens. Lemony Snicket always had a delightfully pessimistic way of explaining how horrible life can be.
It turns out that it is pretty easy to view our world pessimistically right now.
With Trump mere days into his presidency, the parallels between A Series of Unfortunate Events and the Trump presidency go deeper than their synonymous meaning.
To start, as I prefaced this post, we really should not want to watch or read about the misfortune of the Baudelaire children. The sick procession of incapable adults charged with safeguarding their lives should come nowhere near any definition of entertainment. But, we cannot help but watch, compelled by the cast of terrible adults on display in the show.
This fascination with terrible people carved out society’s niche for reality television and, through a particularly shitty reality show, Donald J. Trump. His campaign for president created gaffe after gaffe, insult after insult, and we could not stop watching. He dominated the news with “scandals” that never hurt his support. Lefties like me tuned in to see the latest episode of Trump TV to laugh at his disgraceful conduct and absurdly offensive rhetoric, but we boosted his ratings and got his message in front of millions of Americans for free. And once Trump’s message reached every corner of America, he picked up his 30% of Americans who would do or say whatever Trump wanted. Trump’s insatiable focus on fame and fortune drove many to support him. The human parade of retweets that accompanied Trump’s every move can easily conjure memories of Count Olaf’s minions from his acting troupe. With every absurd plot to catch the Baudelaires comes the minions’ acquiescence and absolute loyalty to a man so obsessed with fame, fortune, and his own talents that you can easily picture him claiming that “he alone can fix this”.
By using the Baudelaire children as voices of reason and intellect in a chaotic world throughout the series, the show juxtaposes society’s demand to respect elders with adults’ propensity to be really fucking stupid, to great comedic effect. Every time Mr. Poe shuts down the Baudelaires’ certainty that a serendipitously new figure in their life is Count Olaf, the children are forced to respectfully be quiet and wallow in their intellectual superiority. The use of libraries and engineering as escapes from dire circumstances helps highlight the importance of education as an answer to society’s ills and obsession with talking down to youth. After electing President Trump on the back of a disproportionately elderly vote, it can feel like young progressives in this country are caught in the trap the Baudelaires faced: a society that does not value education or truth. Hell, in Sean Spicer’s first White House briefing he chastised the media by claiming that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the “biggest in history, period,” when Obama’s was definitively much larger. We live in a time of alternative facts, as Kellyanne Conway put it, and where baby boomers are well and truly screwing over younger generations who predominantly still hold the values of education, truth, and equality close to their hearts.
These comparisons could go on and on. The show highlights things that may seem absurd, like paying mill workers in coupons, but then you remember that Andy Puzder, who opposes unions and a minimum wage, will be our Secretary of Labor. You laugh that Aunt Josephine has a seemingly crazy fear of real estate agents, but they really did help spur on the housing crisis that led to the Great Recession. Mrs. Poe seems over-the-top obsessed with getting front page stories of the Baudelaires at her newspaper in order to increase readership, but BuzzFeed posted that unsubstantiated dossier in a desperate attempt for clicks, not to mention all of the fake news outlets that have seized on the distrust of education, facts, and the media.
As long as all of us continue to partake in the “what did he say this time” absurdity of celebrity politics, we will not escape our post-truth reality. We cannot get distracted by Trump’s attacks on Meryl Streep or Hamilton. We must focus on his disgraceful politics, on the return of the Keystone XL pipeline, silencing EPA workers, the global gag rule, and his scarcely vetted Cabinet. Until we focus on the right issues with Trump, as the final song from Series of Unfortunate Events goes, “You might dream that justice and peace win the day, but that’s not how the story goes.”
Purple State Progressive 
