The Weekly Screed (#601)

The world will always 
welcome voters, as time goes by…
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — The suspense surrounding the presidential debate this week inevitably reminded me of Humphrey Bogart. I soon found my thoughts meandering unbidden between campaign and Casablanca. And it all seemed to make sense.

Of course, the first thing that popped into my head was the heartbreaking airport scene, when Rick tells Ilsa that they’ll always have Paris but that’s all they’ll ever have, because Ilsa’s job is to get on the plane and help Victor Laszlo save humanity from the Nazi scourge. And Rick, well, Rick says, “I've got a job to do, too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.”

After thinking of this, I realized — like a lightning bolt — that John F. Kennedy, delivering his inaugural address in 1961, also had Bogart and Ingrid Bergman on his mind. He understood that his political ambitions and the personal problems of any other individual American didn’t “amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” And that’s why he called for all of us to swallow our egos and each do his or her small part in the “struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”

Just as Victor Laszlo’s stoic heroism reminded Rick that he wasn’t alone in the world with his petty pleasures and heartaches, JFK declared that the lifeblood of our democracy flows through each American, urging us to be fully engaged in our citizenship, giving all we can and sharing all we receive. Articulating the community spirit that he sought to inspire, Kennedy said, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

Jack Kennedy, ex-PT boat captain, would’ve felt right at home in Rick’s. Picture him at the bar, ordering something manly but sophisticated, like Bushmill’s in a snifter (neat). Yvonne, the desperate floozy cast aside by Rick, sidles up to him but he disdains her. He only has eyes for the most beautiful woman in the joint — Ilsa. But when he sees, beside her, Victor Laszlo, the two men, Jack and Laszlo — who’ve both seen their lives flash before their eyes — exchange a subtle, knowing nod across the smoky room. 

Invited to Rick’s table, Jack kisses Ilsa’s hand, understands Rick implicitly, bonds silently with Laszlo, and — applying his wit like a scalpel — reduces Major Strasser to sputtering fury. At the appropriate moment, he knows all the words to the “Marseillaise.”

Later, as the movie ends, with Renault and Rick — their solipsism subsumed — walking off together to join mankind’s struggle against the greatest tyranny ever known, they are not a pair, but a trio. Jack has joined the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The similarity between this old movie and the 2012 election shocks — shocks — me at first. But I can’t escape it. Cleary, all of us voters are like Rick, Sam, Ilsa, Ugarte and the other desperate Casablancans. We all come to Rick’s, all in need of letters of transit, all of us in it for ourselves, as we’ve all been since 1981, 20 years after JFK’s “ask not” speech. That day, a very different but equally likable president, Ronald Reagan gave us permission to be selfish again. “In this present crisis,” he said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Reagan, at Rick’s Café Americain? Easy. After all, Reagan was a movie “star,” who often played a second banana named Eddie or Dan who didn’t get the girl. At Rick’s, I picture Dan as the assistant manager, who rigs the roulette wheel, who turns over Peter Lorre to the gendarmes, who ends up dating Yvonne and working for Signor Ferrari, the fat, amoral capitalist played so unctuously by Sydney Greenstreet. In the B-movie sequel, Casablanca II, Dan’s now manager of the Blue Parrot (with Ferrari at Rick’s). Dan runs the black market in transit papers, rides out the war safely in Casablanca and heads to America afterwards, prosperous enough to run for governor of California.

Today’s America is a sort of oversize B-movie version of Dan’s Blue Parrot, a Hobbesian limbo promised us in Reagan’s first inaugural, all of us working for fat, amoral capitalists. Or we’re not working at all, just trying to scrape together enough inflated francs for illicit travel papers and a plane fare to Lisbon, from which we might flee to safety, to a pre-Blue Parrot America where people look out for one another and welcome strangers from across the sea, across the border, across the frantic fringes where too many of our leaders recruit their political acolytes.

A few years ago, for a while, the plot turned unexpectedly. Some of us, then more and more of us heard, softly, from inside Rick’s, the mellow voice of Dooley Wilson crooning “As Time Goes By.” Pretty soon, everybody — feeling a mixture of hope and curiosity — came to Rick’s. The crowd on the dance floor grew big enough to elect the closest thing we could get to Rick, Barack Obama — darkly handsome, casually charming, dangerously romantic and haunted by a shadowy past.

It didn’t last. The crazy world closed in. But unlike Rick and Ilsa, we didn’t even have Paris.

Obama — like Rick — thought he could humor the Krauts while going his own way. But they ganged up on him, shuttered his saloon, scattered all the high-rollers, chic liberals and fashionable refugees of Casablanca. Finally, he realized he couldn’t appease the bullies if all he gained was just enough autonomy to keep pouring drinks, smoking cigarettes and asking Sam to play it again. He had to risk being noble and share himself again with this crazy world, lest he reduce his soul, literally to a hill of beans.

So, in the new, new ending, Bill and Hillary are on the plane. Four figures walk arm-in-arm into a mystery future shrouded in desert fog. Rick and Renault, of course, but Jack’s beside Bogart and — hurrying to catch up— in long, unmistakable strides…

The Blue Parrot is called Dan’s now, but Dan is a mythic memory. Still hawking black-market salvation but wiring his daily take to secret accounts in Switzerland and the West Indies, an imposter — neither Dan nor Ferrari — moves stiffly among the tables. He’s not fat like Greenstreet. Not charming like Reagan. Not president, like Obama.

He wanted to run Rick’s, but nobody would come.