BEING THERE: WHEN LIFE IMITATES ART

 

In 1979 a movie starring Peter Sellers called "Being There," was released. 

It was about a simple minded gardener who has spent his whole life sequestered in a rich man's mansion, tending to flowers and shrubs. 

Eventually, he is ejected from this gilded world and wanders the streets in the elegant clothes he had retrieved from the attic of his employer, gets hit by a limousine owned by a rich woman, who brings him to her own mansion, where he is taken in and cared for by a doctor and the rich couple who live there.

Eventually, he is introduced to the President of the United States--this is Washington, DC, after all--where his homilies about how each plant has its season, and about how you must water the seeds for them to gain root and grow, are apprehended by his rapt listeners in the White House, on TV talk shows as extended parables and metaphors. 

He is hailed as a guru, a very wise man with an expansive visionary intellect.

And now we have a man, raised in a hermetically sealed world of rich boys, now occupying the White House, speaking in simple phrases: We will make Gaza wonderful.  We will make it such a wonderful place, like a new Riviera. And it will be settled by "world people."

Of course, in the movie, the maid who raised and cared for the gardener before he wandered off, knew he was simple minded--"rice pudding between the ears"--and the scene of her watching his interview on TV, as the people on TV listen in rapt attention to the talk about knowing when to sow and when to reap, and the maid is saying, "That boy is barely able to feed himself."

And now we have our very own Chauncey Gardiner in the White House, telling us about his plan for the Gazza strip, which he says America will own and renovate.

Going back to day one with Trump, we have been told to not take him literally, but to take him seriously. Once he became President, we had to take what he says seriously, until now. It just isn't possible any more to take him seriously as he shouts out whatever thought reaches his mouth, unfiltered by brain. It's okay for TV hosts to speculate and fantasize about solutions, about untested, uncalculated plans, but not for the President.  Until now, whenever a President said he wanted to steer the ship of state in a direction, people said, "Okay, now what do we have to do?" But with Trump, we now say, "Oh, wait a minute. He'll forget all about it and he'll move on."

It's like dealing with a child: just wait until he stops wailing he wants a pony and a motorcycle so he can ride down to Disneyworld, because you know he'll move on, if you just wait a minute.

And everyone from the Speaker of the House, to Republican senators and FOXNEWS stars, are nodding along, exhilarated by the idea of their leader thinking outside the box.

 Way outside the box, like in a nursing home for dementia care.