Have you seen Special Counsel Jack Smith sitting with his hands folded in that cool courtroom in Miami, silently staring at Donald Trump?
He scares even me this far up the country, because we know how The Donald feels being stared at by someone not wearing a MAGA red hat or carrying a golf club.
But the biggest laughter came from voices on news media, about artist William J. Hennessy’s sketches, that made the chubby, scowling Trump look more like movie star Robert Redford with Don Knott’s body.
I’ll tell you the truth: if I ever have to go to court for something I wrote, I’d want Hennessy and his pen there, making me look like California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The MAGA folks must love Hennessy’s view of The Donald, because they’re tired of staring at various television shots of Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose unsmiling Christmas pictures sit on his desk.
There’s no other way Hennessy could draw Special Counsel Smith, because there are no known pictures of him smiling, not even his wedding pictures or graduation. No, not one. Great lawyers don’t smile, you know. I’ve seen no “say cheese” photos of Clarence Darrow or Justice Samuel Alito.
I guess I’ll be the first to refer to Smith as the “Prince of Darkness.”
Yes, “The Prince of Darkness,” because sooner or later, Donald Trump, known for his nicknames, will adopt it, or not. “Jack the Ripper” will surely follow.
Classically, “The Prince of Darkness,” as, your college kids know, is a term used in the great John Milton poem “Paradise Lost,” where it refers to Satan as the embodiment of evil.
How long will it be, I wonder, before Jack Smith comes sweeping into the courtroom in an ankle-length black cape and fedora, holding a carved walking stick?
OK, I apologize. It’s a term, a usable term for advocates on both sides of our political apocalyptic times, so feel free — be you Right, Left or suburban women — to use it. You need not wait for my written permission. It was John Milton’s term.
But the opera bouffe of this trial, and even the coming elections, is not a Netflix comedy and will not include tasteful nudity, dancing girls or a slim Bob Redford Trump.
There will be many months yet of breathless anticipation, sleepless nights and missed pizza dates, even here in sleepy, beautiful Maine.
The current Miami trial and the next and next while proceed, while we’re here fighting ticks and caterpillars, sweating and itching and scanning front page events that are going to have a cosmic life of their own.
We will be dotting our calendars through the rest of our viewing lives, like royal weddings, presidential funerals, Kevin McCarthy’s “Dancing With the Stars” or root canal appointments.
Let’s face it. This is a different world we live in now. Even the weather has become a “Prince of Darkness,” with dark swirling funnels, forest fires and ballets of corruption.
But right now, after weeks of dark rain and sand flies on Old Orchard Beach, we will survive.
Do not take this column as criticisms of the players. They are what they are; characters in my dark view of the game.
Hand me my cape.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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