Like the president, Prince Prospero neglects the suffering of the people. We allow ourselves to be reduced to the president’s level if we wallow in the easy satisfactions.Ī more accurate word is arrogance, which is the tragic flaw that drives “The Masque of the Red Death.”

On social media, there’s been a lot of chatter about schadenfreude, or karma. This figure is none other than the Death itself, and in its presence, first the prince and then his entourage “one by one dropped … in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.”

Amid other distractions, he throws a masked ball at which a stranger dressed in red appears. In a country decimated by an epidemic known as the Red Death, a ruler named Prince Prospero seeks refuge for himself and his courtiers behind the walls of his compound. Yet in that narrow span, Poe offers a cautionary tale about humanity in a plague time, and the wages of inequity and denial. There’s not much to “The Masque of the Red Death,” which was published in 1842: The story runs just 15 paragraphs, barely 2,300 words. It’s almost too on the nose, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” When it was revealed early Friday that President Trump had tested positive for the coronavirus, and as the White House, and the Rose Garden in particular, emerged as a hot spot, I couldn’t help recalling Poe’s dark and trenchant work.

The masque of death