The Meaning of Melania’s Photo Shoot

The story of Melania Trump’s old nude photos, and their odd blossoming into a fable of the trials of immigration, will probably remain as a footnote to this bizarre Presidential campaign, though footnotes to this campaign are rather like footnotes to “Finnegans Wake”: the text itself is so confounding that there isn’t a sentence that might not call for one. Still, it is worth ruminating over for a moment, before it passes away, for two reasons. It shows an unexpected maturity in American life, and then something predictably depressing about the hypocrisy within it, too.