The Modern Witches Of Salem - The Evil Within Searches For The Evil Without, The Tale Of A Political Harridan

Frances Lent stood up before the group - Women For Social Justice, a non-profit advocacy group in Washington, DC - and started in on the litany, the misogyny, misanthropy, and dishonesty of Donald Trump. She spared nothing, so savage and brutal were her attacks on his person, his presidency, and his entire political philosophy. 

She was a woman possessed as demonically as a witch of Salem, women who were accused of Satanic seizure for whom nothing but burning at the stake would do.  No amount of recanting, remission, or penance would rid the soul of evil, and so one woman after another was set alight in the town square. 

Now, modern revisionist thinking has the whole affair one of male patriarchy, fundamentalist religion, and native primitivism; but there were definitely witches in Salem who met their fitting end.  They were not actually possessed by the Devil, of course, but were as close to demonism as one could get.  These women were harridans, vixens without any sense of propriety, social modesty, respect, or civility. . 

That too was an exaggeration, for these women were merely proto-feminists who refused to labor under the yoke of male patriarchy, whose sexuality was not to be denied, and for whom motherhood was yet one more link in the chain of oppression.  

For all intents and purposes, at least those of the Puritan clerics of Salem, Abigail Penn was possessed.  No woman in her right mind or of God-fearing piety would ever think of such unholy, godless impurity as she did.  She demeaned, unmanned, and drove her first husband to death, so intimidated her second that he disappeared without a trace and probably took his own life so belittled and soul-battered was he.  

Abigail knew she was not long for this world, Salem's prosecutors being what they were, but such was her ire, spite, and undaunted commitment.  She would not be harnessed, tethered, and trapped by these pigs. She went to her death defiantly, shouting obscenities and horrible, hateful reproaches to God and men until the fire consumed her.  

She was truly a woman possessed, just not by the Devil.  In fact her misandry focused especially on the town's clerics, those pompous, self-righteous, self-assured fools who claimed to be anointed by God but were only ignorant, unsexed, blathering fools. 

Frances Lent railed on, her voice raised to a higher and higher pitch, her whole body wracked with violent, hostile, untoward and untamed meanness.  She became unhinged, one bolt after another loosened, screws falling out, latches opening, until she was a maniacal, possessed whirling dervish of animus and hate. 

She stopped, mopped her brow, ran her trembling fingers through her hair, took a deep breath, calmed herself until the volcanic eruption had spent itself, and sat down to riotous applause. 

The women in the audience were all as deeply committed to political activism as Frances, but had none of her intimidating power.  They hated Donald Trump and his brutal, murderous policies; felt that he was the very incarnation of evil, a man possessed by insidious, devilish intentions who must be stopped.  They just didn't have Frances' calling. 

They all filed out of Baker Hall, congratulated themselves on their commitment to progressive action, energized by the words of Frances Lent, and increasingly eager to see justice in the world. 

Now Frances did not stop with Donald Trump. Her possession had a broader, wider ambit. Every item in the progressive canon was so existential in nature that unless action were taken, the world would be incinerated by global warming, diversity erased, equity abolished, and the unwanted exiled to gulags and concentration camps. 

She saw evil everywhere, could not sleep because of its miasmic, encroaching presence.  She saw shadows on her nighttime walls, sat up with a start, and felt them closing in.  In the morning after a fitful sleep she went out, unsteady in gait but rock-solid in purpose and intent. 

Now, secular witches like Frances Lent don't just happen.  Psychiatrists would have a field day parsing her attitudes and impulses, delving into her past, and constructing a meme of disordered but potent neurosis.  In fact she started off well, dutiful daughter of loving parents, nothing unsavory happened during her childhood.  

 

Something snapped in adolescence. Not only did she become as surly, disrespectful, spiteful, and angry as her peers, but hostile.  It was as though her lymphatic system had been injected with alien hormones that caused a total short-circuiting of her behavior.  She became uncontrollable, savagely critical of her classmates, calling out every imperfection, snidely accusing them of the most ignorant desires, belittling their paltry intelligence, and sending them home in tears.  

This hostility, this seemingly inbred, ineluctable meanness could not be explained by the usual psychological analysis, but it might be by tracing her family legacy.  There simply had to be someone in her ancestry who was as wildly possessed, as untamed, bitter, and misanthropic as Frances.  All to no avail, which is why the Salem witch comparison was reasonable and valid. 

Everything in life is on a bell curve - intelligence, creativity, beauty, compassion, insight, and the like - and just as there are geniuses on one asymptote, eight-year olds who can solve infinitely complex equations, masters of chess before they are out of diapers, violin virtuosos at three, there are people like Frances, unexplained, native, fiendish personalities that arise out of nowhere. 

Frances was the perfect advocate for the progressive movement, for it by nature was naysaying, righteously reformist, and absolutist.  Reason was an unnecessary addendum when true belief was at stake.  Climate change, the continual male oppression of women, racism, and capitalist greed were obvious to anyone who looked.  There was no need to weigh alternatives or to subject arguments to rebuttal; moreover, because these issues were undeniable and existential, the more passion and zeal commanded, the better. 

At the heart of these imposing problems was the inherent evil of those who refused to see them.  Americans were dupes, seduced by politicians and preachers, locked into ignorance which metastasized into hate. Progressives were bound not only to confront this ignorance but to do everything in their power to neuter and eliminate those who opposed them - to cancel them, to consign them to irrelevance. 

Progressives' revisionist history was part of the same ethos.  It wasn't enough to condemn slavery.  One had to expunge all traces of it from the historical record.  Confederate statues must come down, the names of schools and public institutions changed to reflect the contributions of people of color.  The political volubility - the incessant hammering of civil ignorance and the insidious actions of government leaders - was extended to the past.  Everything past and present was caught in the net of liberal anxiety. 

So Frances Lent with all her hysterics, her wild, untamed hostility; with all her meanness, cruel intentions, and totally unhinged animus was perfect for the movement.  She was cover girl, poster child, first and foremost, and heralded as a princess of peace.  

She was the most perfect clone of Salem witch Abigail Penn that ever lived.