Hail, hail Freedonia!
by David Benjamin
“The
last man nearly ruined this country./ He didn’t know what to do with
it./ If you think this country’s bad off now,/ Just wait ’til I get
through with it!”
— Rufus T. Firefly
PARIS — The latest burst of palace intrigue in the Trump White House sent me running, panic-stricken, to Duck Soup. Where I asked the question: Who, really is a better president for America today?
Donald Trump or Rufus T. Firefly?
This is no easy choice.
A
recent survey of presidential historians moved James Buchanan out of
the top spot he had monopolized for 157 years, as the worst U.S.
president — ever. After a mere year in office, Trump leapfrogged
Buchanan to Number One.
This unique honor moves Trump into Firefly territory.
I’m
surprised the nation’s pundits haven’t been drawing more Rufus-Donald
parallels. Some of the similarities are eerie. For example, in his first
speech onscreen, Firefly launches a stream-of-consciousness riff that
could’ve been lifted straight out of a Trump rally. He begins by leering
at a woman, Mrs.Teasdale (Margaret Dumont), and continues by
disparaging her physical appearance. Shades of Rosie O’Donnell!
“Say,
you cover a lot of ground yourself. You’d better beat it. I hear
they’re gonna tear you down and put up an office building where you’re
standing. You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi, you can
leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a
huff. You know, you haven’t stopped talking since I came here. You
must’ve been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.”
Besides a
remarkably prescient reference to real-estate development in this
monolog, we see here a technique oft-credited to Trump but deftly
demonstrated by Rufus T. Firefly as early as 1933. The Gatling-gun
demagogue overwhelms his listener with a barrage of non sequiturs so
swift and incoherent that he can be neither queried nor challenged. All
his victim can do — as Mrs. Teasdale and a hundred Trump interviewers
have illustrated — is stagger on to the next topic. Dazed and confused,
she says, “This is a gala day for you!”
Firefly responds with a
sexist punchline that Trump, alas, wouldn’t be quick (or modest) enough
to deliver: “Well, a gal a day is enough for me. I don’t think I could
handle anymore.”
The Trump-Firefly nexus includes some remarkable
physical commonalities. Both wear bulgy suits and Bozo ties. Firefly
has a fake mustache.Trump has fake complexion. Firefly wears glasses,
Trump wears tanning goggles. They both walk funny, talk dirty and make
faces. Firefly is called “Your excellency.” Trump, desperately, would
love to be.
Each is a master of hypocrisy. Trump styles himself
as a “law and order” guy, after settling $25 million on the victims of
his fraudulent university and launching an administration in which four
of its architects have, so far, pled guilty in criminal indictments. The
first law Firefly proposes, while holding his cigar, is a ban on
smoking.
He sings, “I will not stand for anything that’s crooked
or unfair./ I’m strictly on the up and up, so everyone beware./ If
anyone’s caught taking graft and I don’t get my share,/ We’ll stand ‘em
up against the wall/ And pop goes the weasel!”
On the matter of
business acumen and fiscal probity, the president of Freedonia boasts
his special aptitude, as well as Trump’s, when he declares, “Why a
four-year-old child could understand this [tax] report. Run out and find
me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head or tail of it.”
Speaking
of the tax, however, Firefly has the jump on Trump, because he knows
you have to take up the tacks before you take up the carpet. This is a
manual labor test that would probably stump Trump. Or, as his sainted
mother used to say: “Pants first, Donald. Then the shoes.”
As for
Trump’s famous difficulty paying attention at meetings, Rufus T.
Firefly plays jacks while presiding over his Cabinet. Trump — note the
tiny, fidgety, Tweet-callused fingers — only wishes he could.
Of
course, both Trump and Firefly are shameless, prolific liars. But it’s
Firefly who succinctly states their mutual affinity for truthiness:
“Well, who are you gonna believe? Me, or your own eyes?”
Both
leaders have a knack for finding talent in queer places. Trump put a
brain surgeon and a party planner in charge of his housing office, a
tobacco investor in charge of public health and — running his Energy
Department — a guy who thought it was the Electric Company. Firefly
hires a peanut vendor as his Secretary of War.
Trump’s senior
advisor is his son-in-law, Jared. Firefly’s senior adviser is his
brother, Zeppo. Difference is, we know Zeppo can sing and dance. Can
Jared even carry a tune, do a box-step, or just recite “The Boy Stood on
the Burning Deck”?
Speaking of electric companies, Freedonia’s
worst enemy is Sylvania, a tiny country run by a paranoid tinpot against
whom Rufus T. Firefly triggers a war by shooting off his mouth in an
unhinged gush of self-contradiction:
“I’d be only too happy to
meet Ambassador Trentino and offer him on behalf of my country the right
hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure he will accept this gesture in
the spirit in which it is offered. But suppose he doesn’t. A fine thing
that’ll be. I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept it. That’ll add
a lot to my prestige, won’t it? Me, the head of a country snubbed by a
foreign ambassador! Who does he think he is, that he can come here and
make a sap out of me in front of my people? Think of it! I hold out my
hand and that hyena refuses to accept it. Why, the cheap four-flushing
swine! He’ll never get away with it!”
Trentino, of course,
doesn’t get away with it, or even get the chance. In a gesture that must
fill Donald Trump with jealousy every time he watches Duck Soup, Firefly slaps Trentino across the chops and starts a war whose very theme song would render Trump green with envy:
“To war, to war,
To war we’re gonna go!
Hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de,
Hi-de, hi-de ho!”
With a toe-tapping refrain that the NRA would love to use, if only they didn’t have to credit the Marx Brothers:
“They got guns, we got guns,
All God’s chil’en got guns!”
Guns,
of course, is where Trump has it all over Rufus T. Firefly. Trump has
no war of his very own— yet — but he commands so many guns, rockets,
bombs and bombers, nukes, missiles, tanks, jets, submarines, soldiers,
sailors, Marines, Navy Seals and other forms of cannon fodder that he
wants to march ‘em all down Pennsylvania Avenue in a million-dollar
Busby Berkeley parade.
True to form, Firefly runs out of bullets
before his war is over and he has to start throwing apples and bananas
at the Sylvanian chief — who surrenders under the onslaught. This
prompts one of the great last lines in the history of film: “I’m sorry.
You’ll have to wait ’til the fruit runs out.”
But there you have
the clincher — the answer to why Rufus T. Firefly would be, for America
today, a far, far better president than Donald J. Trump.
Both are clowns. Only one is funny.
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
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