Bananas, Jabberwocky, Deadpool and Apocalypse Now

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.  Whom amongst us haven’t been thinking of these four movies lately?  In Bananas, Woody Allen’s third film, Woody’s character Fielding Mellish stumbles into a Latin American revolution and helps its leader become president of his country.  Problem is, the leader is quite the loon.  His first decree is to make all the citizens wear their underwear on the outside of their clothes.

In 1977’s Jabberwocky, from Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin, Palin’s character slays the fearsome, dragon-like title beast.  As soon as the monster is dead, the king and his coterie show up.  He sticks his sword in the cadaver and takes the glory.

Last year’s Deadpool opens with a very slow motion shot of the title character getting knocked ass over elbows in a bomb blast. That’s how I felt in Trump’s first week in office: in a glacially-slow explosion that I had no control over.

This may be the last time I can use “glacially” to describe extreme slowness.  Glaciers are likely to speed up during the new administration.

With the Cheeto already making absurd moves like launching an investigation into nonexistent voter fraud, and claiming victories by vetoing the already dead TPP, you can understand my dread.

I dearly hope the millions marching last Saturday morph into a movement.  We have plenty of opposition to overcome.  Yesterday’s March for Life, which also had a robust turnout, was not a Trump rally per se, but I’d bet there wasn’t much overlap between the two groups.  And it did have The Donnie’s approval, plus Pence’s attendance.

It fascinates and galls me how Trump’s surrogates can put such positive spin on his specious moves while ignoring or glossing over his outrages like the flap over Inauguration attendance.  One of the more reasoned of them erroneously said Trump had created 5000 new Immigration officers.  The actual creation and funding of that is up to Congress.

Many of his Executive Orders are empty gestures.  Very soon that will be obvious.  I realize that Trump has a core of supporters that would not abandon him even if they saw photos of him smothering Justice Scalia with a pillow.  The Democrats need to get their shit together rapidly so they can start peeling off the marginal Trump supporters burned by his failed policies.   A trade war with Mexico and a screwed-up replacement of Obamacare should start that avalanche nicely.

To finish my movie metaphor: I think Apocalypse Now speaks for itself.