The Weekly Screed (#929)

Red rover, red rover, 
send Gordy right over

By David Benjamin

“Robert D. Luskin, Mr. Sondland’s lawyer, said in a statement that as a State Department employee, his client had no choice but to comply with the administration’s direction. He said Mr. Sondland was ‘profoundly disappointed’ he was not able to testify, and would do so in the future if allowed.”

— New York Times,9 October 2019

MADISON, Wis. — Red rover is a wonderfully simple — actually, stupid — and ruthless backyard children’s game. 

The way we used to play it on Pearl Street in Tomah (I suspect there are a dozen variations depending on local customs) requires eight or ten kids of varying age, height, weight, gender and ethnicity. The combatants form two lines, with tightly linked hands, facing each other a few yards apart. 

Then, the “captain” of one team calls for a member of the opposing force — ideally the most puny, girlish and timid — to charge pell-mell into the wall of enemy kids and bust through. This charge is ideally aimed at the noodliest pair of linked hands. A breakthrough ends the game. But if the attack fails, which it usually does, the foiled assailant has to join the team that just flattened her. Then, the other team takes its turn, directing at the littlest, scrawniest opponent the timeless rhyme, “Red rover, red rover, send Baby Snookums (or Tiny Tim, or Fat Larry) right over!”

As I recall, the rules required that you couldn’t keep sending the same hapless weakling back and forth, ping-ponging the poor kid willy-nilly like a ragdoll in a clothes dryer. You had to be fair. You had to change victims. After nine or ten rounds, a rousing game of red rover normally resulted in several players with fat lips, various contusions and abrasions and at least one torn, bruised moznik led home crying.

I thought of red rover — and the tossing around of Baby Snookums (or Fat Larry) — while reading today about Gordon D. Sondland, a filthy-rich, multi-chinned innkeeper who paid Donald Trump a cool million for his appointment as U.S. ambassador to the European Union. Gordy, who spent more time in Ukraine (which does not belong to the EU) than in Brussels, is a diplomatic neophyte, unschooled in foreign affairs, who ended up hanging around — and taking orders from — Trump’s increasingly smarmy consiglieri, Rudy Giuliani.

Continuing the backyard analogy, Gordy in Trumpworld became the new kid on a block where the ruling bully was Big Donny. Gordy didn’t mind being the first kid sent over, again and again, knocked down and bounced around. After all, gosh! He’d been welcomed into the gang and got to hold hands, once in a while (when he wasn’t flat on his pudgy ass), with Big Donny. 

Gordy took a long time before he figured out the game and realized that Big Donny’s turf was not a backyard on Pearl Street. These kids didn’t play fair and they were mean. They’d let you in, but if you landed hard and couldn’t pick yourself up, they’d leave you on the ground.

Because the ground is where fall guys are found.

One day, Gordon Sondland turned on the news and discovered that he was part of a scheme, ramrodded by his purported homey, Giuliani, to subvert the 2020 US election. He’d been tasked to help extort disinformation — from the president of Ukraine — about Big Donny’s political enemies. It’s possible, even likely, that at first Gordy thought this was all okay. A thumb in the eye, a knee in the crotch — just part of the game. 

However, eventually, Gordy figured out that what he’d been doing wasn’t just a rock-‘em, sock-‘em backyard brawl. It was a crime. He was violating the Constitution and looking at federal time as Paul Manafort’s cellmate. This is when Gordy decided to take care of himself, not from any sort of moral epiphany or upsurge of good sportsmanship, but because he understood that the first guy who confesses in a criminal conspiracy is the one who gets immunity. 

This is also the moment when Big Donny and the mean kids let Gordy know that he’d never been really welcome in the neighborhood. They gathered ’round Sondland, shoved a gag in his mouth and told him, “Gordo, if you tell on us, you’re gonna be sorry you were ever born.”

Currently, the game (which isn’t a game) isn’t over. It’s actually just starting. If this was Grandma Annie’s backyard on Pearl Street, with Trump pitted against House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff — who weighs roughly half as much as Big Donny — nobody, including Gordy would want to get picked by the kid known affectionately as Pencilneck.

But politics, to misquote Mr. Dooley, ain’t red rover. And there are still players to be picked.

Speaking of which — digressively — I doubt that most kids nowadays, addicted to their smartphones and cocooned in their rooms playing “Grade School Massacre” and “Hump the Harem,” could get up an after-dark game of red rover (or stoop tag, statues, even marbles or mumbletypeg) and know how to play it. Even if, somehow, they found enough kids, made up a few rules, occupied a patch of lawn and started launching themselves across the grass, there would appear suddenly a shocked mother shouting at the kids to stop before someone gets hurt, scolding them all for their brutishness and then — next day — sentencing her own offspring to some equally violent but adult-supervised alternative, like organized soccer or the Cobra Kai.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, where there are no moms to ruin the fun, the soft but implacable voice of Pencilneck can be heard breaking the twilight stillness. “Red rover, red rover, send Marie Yovanovitch right over…”