As the Congress of Appeasers, Accommodators and Enablers readies to hear France’s new leader, they might prep with a showing of Casablanca. At no time have the Peeps more resembled the vacillating and ineffectual crowd at Rick’s Cafe Americain. Yesterday Charles Schumer, the Senator for New York, took out an op-ed in the NYT’s to claim his credibility on voting for Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general, who doesn’t think that half drowning a woman or man with a bag over her head constitutes torture. That is, he isn’t sure. Schumer follows in the footsteps of his Weak Sister from California, Diane Feinstein, who this week also cast her vote for torture with resolute conviction.
As it is widely reported, "Sarko the American" as he is known in France, makes his first official visit to Washington this week to try to " . . . heal the wounds over France's opposition to the Iraq war . . . " He hopes to affirm that he is a sure ally of President Bush in his most trying hour.
Good to have a friend, even one who fauns. Reports tell us that there is a "collective swoon" in the Oval Office over this Frenchman. That should be a tip off: Bush, like most Texans, hates France and everything about France and always has. Why do they like this particular Frenchman?
It seems so long ago now but as I recall, it was Donald Rumsfeld that called Bush’s New World Order, "old Europe" and "new Europe." New Europe consisted of our vassal state England, our two pseudo-American Euro-states, Poland and the Czech Republic, Turkey and another place about the size of Ellis Island with a name I can’t pronounce.
Today, Poland, governed by twins - which is a nice touch for a country that can’t remember who it is - is opting out as it realizes that the price of being a pseudo-American Euro-state is high, and that these "new Europe" satellites are merely our own Gurka forces; tribalish Foreign Devils who admire us enormously, fighting on our behalf in our global war on the dark-skinned non-Christians of the world, and missile sites to territorialize Russia.
Now the English have dashed home to shoot rare and endangered birds on the Queen’s private preserve. Turkey is among our greatest enemies. And General What’s His-Name in Pakistan, hoping to develop a new nazi-burgher class globally, is about to lose his funny CIA money.
But, alors, now here in the darkest hour, France comes to our aid.
Congress should turn this man out: He comes to us as Marshall Petain came to France. As you recall, when the messenger from the French Underground was shot down at the beginning of Casablanca, he fell beneath a large portrait of Marshall Petain, who accommodated the German invaders in the Vichy regime. Likewise Sarkozy accommodates and appeases today a President without moral bearings and a Congress without a backbone.
We are now at a Vichy moment; a moment like that portrayed in the movie Casablanca, about an incident at Rick’s Café American which turned the world from accommodation to character. Today we are all Monsieur Rick, tormented and torn between man and mouse, waiting for the man of courage and valor and resolute conviction to arrive and order the playing of La Marseillaise.
That man is not Nicolas Sarkozy.
Note to Congress: If you Google "YouTube – Casablanca – French National Anthem" you can view a dramatization of the shift from accommodation to character when Paul Heinreid, taking his cue from Humphrey Bogart, orders the local band at Rick’s to play La Marseillaise, drowning out the Vichy Swine in the greatest two minutes in the history of electricity.
Suggested reading for Sarko the American and the new torture buffs in Congress and in the Oval Office: Franz Kafka: In the Penal Colony, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and much more, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Andre Malraux’s: Man’s Fate, Man’s Hope, Anti-Memoirs.
One question: Who raised you?