Weekly Mind Dump: What "Casablanca" Teaches Us About Ourselves & Freedom

Freedom is precious. Willingly give it up and you pay the price.

Week of 10/13-10/19, 2024:

In the movie, Casablanca, a customer at Rick’s Cafe tells Rick, “We came from Bulgaria. Oh, things are very bad there, monsieur. The Devil has the people by the throat. So, Jan and I, we, we do not want our children to grow up in such a country.”

Rick responds warily, “So you decided to go to America.”

Many Americans are on the cusp of deciding whether they will want to raise their children in a country they will no longer recognize, one in which “the Devil has the people by the throat.” Will America in the 2020s become the Bulgaria of the 1940s?

As fate has it we will know in a couple of weeks when Americans cast their vote. The irony, of course, is that most Europeans had fascism imposed on them nine decades ago. Americans today may willingly embrace it.

The Devil has millions of Americans in his grip. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around why for years now, as my readers know. I’ve explored wealth and income inequality, off-shoring of manufacturing jobs, globalism, immigration and racism as catalysts for the surge in right-wing populism. But I still don’t get it. The Economist calls the U.S. economy “the envy of the world.” The World Bank reports, “The U.S. economy, in particular, has shown impressive resilience,” and attributes “U.S. dynamism” as the engine driving economic growth globally. So, there’s no Great Depression feeding extremism.

But extremism, specifically on the political right, continues to grow. Here’s an exchange between an attendee and Trump acolyte Gen. Michael Flynn at a Christian nationalist event last Friday:

ATTENDEE: Is there any chance that, should the election go in a positive result, you would get your rank reinstated and sit at the head of a military tribunal to not only drain the swamp but imprison the swamp — and, on a few occasions, execute the swamp?

FLYNN: I’m about winning. We have to win. And these people are already up to no good. So, we gotta win first. We win, and then, “Katy, bar the door.” OK? Believe me: The gates of hell — my hell — will be unleashed.

Asked about “bureaucrats undermining you” in a second term, Donald Trump replied: “We have two enemies: we have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.”

And he said on Fox News —

We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics.

It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary by the military.

Trump also threatened, if re-elected, to close down ABC News, CBS and its “60 Minutes” program as well as the New York Times.

The Washington Post reports the arrest of an Iraq War veteran and National Guard member in North Carolina who was calling for taking up arms against police and government officials. He was also training other far-right extremists in how to make sophisticated explosives. “He is among more than 480 people with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection.”

According to the Post:

While the pace at which the overall population has been radicalizing increased in recent years, people with military backgrounds have been radicalizing at a faster rate. Their extremist plots were also more likely to involve weapons training or firearms than plots that didn’t include someone with a military background

Friends are telling me that I’m a Cassandra, that my recent posts, in particular, are causing them to lose sleep at night. I apologize for that, but I also remind them that I’m just one canary in the coal mine and that I’ve lived in dictatorships. So much is at stake. And should Americans choose to hand power back to a demented sociopath hell-bent on destroying this democracy bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers, and giving up the nation’s security over to our enemies, then they will have nobody to blame for the resultant loss of freedoms and ensuant chaos than themselves.

So, back to Casablanca and what it has to teach us.

At least nine of the 1942 film’s cast members were genuine European refugees or exiles, including leading actors Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre. Henreid was an Austrian anti-Nazi who fled his native land after the Nazis declared him an “official enemy of the Third Reich.” Veidt likewise was a German anti-Nazi whose wife was Jewish. Lorre, a Hungarian Jew, fled Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. A witness to the filming of the “duel of the anthems” scene said he saw many of the actors crying and “realized that they were all real refugees.” An author of a book about the movie states that they “brought to a dozen small roles in Casablanca an understanding and a desperation that could never have come from Central Casting.”

Under a MAGA regime, the operative Casablanca words will be, “Round up the usual suspects.”

Casablanca’s Rick moves easily in a corrupt world just as Trump & Gang do (though Rick himself is not a crook). A Trump return to leadership will deliver chaos and isolationism. When Major Strasser asks Rick his nationality, he replies, “I’m a drunkard” (Trump: “I’m a very stable genius”). Rick’s personal code: “I stick my neck out for nobody” (Trump: “Let them do whatever the hell they want.”)

The movie’s exemplar for me in these trying times is resistance fighter Victor Laszlo. When asked why he risks his life fighting the Nazis, Laszlo responds, “You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.”

And should Kamala Harris triumph, we freedom lovers will breathe easier (and hopefully stop losing sleep) and sigh: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”