I have to laugh at the recent Trump settlement with the IRS for what most people are calling $1.776 slush fund. I refuse to get offended or upset with these financial and legal shenanigans Trump is, and has, pulled over our heads. He has really refined the art of the steel from land deals with city and county commissions to the fleecing at the federal level.
And further more, I think we should just chuck all the democracy talk of, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, as too esoteric. We need to push that sort of fear and the death of our Republic to one side and look at what is going on with this administration’s shenanigans. Or as Merriam-Webster describes as the “devious trick(s) used especially for an underhand purpose;” or the “activity or behavior that is not honest or proper: deceptive or questionable practices or conduct.” Trump and Associates have refined the tools of democracy to boldly walk through the front door and then walk out the front door in broad daylight in plain sight with loaded pockets.
The funny part in all of this is we opened the door and let him. Their methods appears to some as a smash and grab, which was the case with his January Sixers cohort. With that said these are not the activities of say a cat burglar who tries to avoid being seen using stealth and deception like Cary Grant in the 1955 Alfred Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief. What we need to do is dumb the Trump administration down to something Hollywood could produce and everybody could see in relation to what the viewing public understands.
For instance, we could go back to the 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda. I am not going to rehash the entire movie but to quote Wikipedia the movie is a “heist comedy film…(that) follows a gang of diamond thieves who double-cross one another to recover the stolen diamonds hidden by their jailed leader.” Although, in our current state of affairs the leader is not jailed.
But according to PBS News, “As part of the (Anti-Weaponization) IRS settlement agreement, the U.S. is ‘forever barred and precluded’ from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons and the Trump organization’s current tax issues, according to a one-page document posted to the Justice Department’s website on Tuesday’.”
I get it, there is a slight difference in the plot; but, get out of jail or stay out of jail, it seems to me to be the same side of the soon to be minted coin. A one-dollar commemorative coin featuring Trump’s image on both sides. Heads its Trump, tails its Trump. Unfortunately, it won’t be minted in time for the country’s 250th birthday. Too bad, we could honor our First President by going down to the Potomac River and see if we could throw them across the river.
Whatever the case may be, we are more familiar with heist movies than movies about democracy. If we consider what is going on in our government as a heist operation instead of governing or some sort of governmental effort to make America better, I think we can better understand the current workings of our government. I reference the movie A Fish Called Wanda but we could probably insert any of the Oceans movies going back to the 1960s with the Rat Pack, or the 2003 The Italian Job, or the Tower Heist (2011). It is all about the grift.
The reason I picked A Fish Called Wanda is for one particular scene where Otto, the vulgar American weapons expert hangs the sophisticated British barrister, Archie, out a window upside down demanding an apology. I just feel like Archie represents the American people. We are being hung upside down. Shaken down and now forced to apologize for crimes that somehow we were complicit in. (See Youtube link below for video)
Instead of ranting or raving about the current state of affairs we should do like what Roger Ebert said in his review of this Anglo/American comedy, laugh loudly when “eccentric people behave in obsessive and eccentric ways and other, equally eccentric, people do everything they can to offend and upset the first batch” Their motto could be: Find out how much there is, get it, and get.
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