I don’t pay much attention to the current president’s tweets because:
- They’re usually meant to distract from something else much more important.
- They’re usually mind-numbingly juvenile and as an “older person” I don’t like to waste my remaining years with stupid.
- They’re usually an empty threat or a lie.
But when, on Saturday, he co-opted Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now poster and dialogue to make a joke threat of invading the great American city of Chicago – a town where I went to grad school, lived in briefly in my early twenties, and formed key lasting friendships over more than four decades, he pissed me off.
Royally.
Though royalty is something he will never be no matter how much he tries to act like King George III.
Anyway, I hate to reprint him (Note: POTUS, not the Real King) but desperate times call for desperate measures when you sense danger. So here it is.
Some observations:
- When the president of a country thinks it’s cool to declare “war” on an American city – metaphorically, in reality or both – it’s time to stop what you’re doing and pay attention. (Note: You are allowed, however, to watch the men’s U.S. Open’s Final Sunday because we don’t want to ruin EVERYTHING good).
2. This POTUS renamed our Department of Defense to our Department of War by executive order on Friday even though it’s not official and not legal since that power lies with Congress. So clearly he’s signaling how he’s planning to “rule” unless he’s stopped.
3. The ad he’s “parodying” features a black-hearted but fictional U.S. lieutenant colonel during the Vietnam War who famously said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It was a piece of dialogue illustrating how uncaring, sadistic and morally reprehensible/insane this fictional military man was. So when you are the actual real-life president – and put an image of YOU in place of the colonel – it means either:
a. You want to be seen as just that.
b. You are just that.
Or
You are BOTH a. and b. At least in your own mind.
Whichever you or I choose to answer to any of these questions or observations it’s clear that the current occupant of the Oval Office intends to order his battalions of enforcers (Note: ICE Agents, the National Guard from a red state since blue states aren’t playing and, well other masked guys) into the streets of another blue city to round up as many people as possible – much in the style napalm rid Vietnam of Vietnamese of all ages that fictional colonel wanted to exterminate.
Will he do it?
Won’t he do it?
That’s the reality show teaser promo this POTUS, a former reality TV show host and life-long bottom feeding huckster who in the last year has made $3-5 Billion in bitcoin selling virtual tchotchkes of himself, wants us to play.
Well, we’re not playing.
But we ARE paying attention.
Because there are 2.72 million people in Chicago, many of them non-white and a lot of them immigrants, who are being threatened. They are threatened not so much by the face of the colonel inserted in the ad, but by someone with the same face acting more like a real life counterpart of the fictional Col. Kurtz that Marlon Brando played in the last third of that Coppola film classic.
And he was plain bat shit crazy.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is clearly treating the situation as such. Over the weekend his response was short and to the point.
The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.
Tens of thousands of people across the country took to the streets in red and blue cities in the last week, enraged at the militaristic threats, mass raids rounding up innocent citizens and the stripping of rights and legal status.
The current administration is also losing court cases nationwide, most recently from the federal bench, which ruled his deployment of troops in my home state of California was illegal.
And yet the threats continue, often veiled in lame comedy, as do the lies (Note: Crime is down in Chicago and Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles). As does the misinformation and obsequiousness of his cabinet AND his private spray of willingly sycophantic billionaires (Note: Check out Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg caught on a hot mic serving up embarrassingly servile by watching this four minute segment in its entirety) which has now reached Saturday Night Live level.
It all reeks of either a new Gilded Age or the beginning of a contemporary version of the French Revolution.
Though many people are saying it’s beginning to sound more like Russian oligarchy or the seeds of a late 1930s-style German dictatorship.
Whatever it is or is not any of those, it’s worth paying attention to.
Not because it’s now co-opted imagery and dialogue from one of our greatest American director’s work.
But because it’s more serious than the heart attack lead actor Martin Sheen had that caused Apocalypse Now to famously shut down during filming.
He recovered from that and went on to play the president of our dreams on The West Wing.
But will we?
Let’s do more than hope we can do the same and recast our real life leader in the next election.
One that is not only free but fair.
And take to the streets en masse if the narrative begins to more and more lean towards the apocalypse.
The Doors – “The End” (with scenes from Apocalpyse Now)
notes from a chair 