I’ve been reading this past week about Wm. Barr and others in Trump’s Inner Ovoid trying to distance themselves from Glorious Leader, and some of their remarks remind me of a line from Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta, The Mikado.
In the opera, the fictional Japanese town of Titipu, (yes, that’s the name. Stop giggling), has elected a cheap tailor named Koko to the exalted rank of Lord High Executioner, on the assumption that he’s not likely to actually kill anybody because he’s technically next on the list to be executed. The Emperor made flirting a capital crime, you see, and so… never mind. It’s complicated. You just need to know that Koko has been appointed to the most important government official in the community.
An unintended consequence of this, is that all the other government officials in the town have resigned en masse, because they are all nobles and refuse to serve under a mere common tailor. All except for one nobleman named Pooh-Bah, the scion of a very old and very proud family. He traces his ancestry beyond Adam to the first protoplasmic globule, and therefore his sense of family pride is something inconceivable. “I can’t help it,” he admits; “I was born sneering.” So in an attempt to mortify this family pride, he selflessly takes on the indignity of serving in all of the vacant civil positions in town. (He also takes on the indignity of drawing a salary for each one. “A Pooh-Bah a salaried minion!” he laments.) A running gag throughout the opera is how Pooh-Bah often finds conflicts of interest between, say, his role as Koko’s Official Wedding Planner vs. his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer, which requires a substantial “insult” (bribe) to reconcile.
Eventually a situation comes up when the characters need to fake an execution, to prevent the town from being demoted to the status of village. Koko gives the Mikado an account of this fictitious execution, bolstered by “corroborative detail” from Pooh-Bah.
KO-KO: The Coroner has just handed me his certificate.
POOH-BAH: I am the Coroner. (KO-KO hands certificate to MIKADO)
MIKADO: (reads): “At Titipu, in the presence of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Chief Justice, Attorney-General, Secretary of State for the Home Department, Lord Mayor, and Groom of the Second Floor Front.”
POOH-BAH: They were all present, your Majesty. I counted them myself.
MIKADO: Very good house. I wish I’d been in time for the performance.
Alas, it turns out that the young man whom they put down as the executed criminal is actually the Mikado’s son, Nanki-Poo, (who had been traveling incognito under the guise of a Second Trombone), and that the penalty for killing the Mikado’s son is “...something humorous, but lingering, with either boiling oil or melted lead.”
“I assure you, we had no idea --” Ko-ko pleads. “We didn’t know!”
To which Pooh-Bah adds, “I wasn’t there.”
Which is just about what the people who used to work for Trump are now saying, or words to that effect.
It’s funny. For the past four years, every time one of Trump’s staff gets in any kind of trouble, Glorious Leader has shrugged and said, “I really didn’t know him. I think he just got the coffee.” And now, it’s his minions who are saying, “I really didn’t know him; I just got his coffee.”