- What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears? – Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
During my long days of studying while home for the holidays, I would occasionally set aside academics and lose myself in cartoons.
When I was growing up in Normandy, I watched a lot of cartoons made between the 1940s and the 1960s. My love for cartoons from that era began when my mother and aunt passed along their love for series such as Top Cat and The Flintstones. Both these shows, produced by Hanna-Barbera Cartoons (an offshoot of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), had sharp dialogue, unforgettable voices, and fast-talking protagonists, whether two cavemen and their wives or a witty feline modeled on comedian Phil Silvers (to whom I owe much of my writing style).
In an episode titled “The Tycoon,” Fred Flintstone, in a classic prince versus pauper turnaround, has to act the part of his millionaire industrialist lookalike, J.L. Gotrocks, who escapes from his office to live one day away from the trappings of wealth and power. Fred, handpicked from his job at the rock quarry to fill in as Gotrocks and buy time until the real one is found, is instructed by top company executives to say only three things during business meetings: “Whose baby is that?”; “What’s your angle?”; “I’ll buy that.” During that time, Gotrocks insults everyone Fred knows, wreaking enough havoc for Fred to get a good walloping from all parties when he finally returns home. The credits roll, the theme music plays. The end.
The questions “whose baby is that?” and “what’s your angle?” are irrelevant to Trump’s reasoning. The first one he asks as a formality, knowing full well he will take credit for whatever good idea may come afterwards; the second one is totally obsolete, since the only angle he seems interested in is his own – and that, to him, is enough.
Never would I think of comparing any Flintstones character — not even Fred’s tyrannical boss Mr. Slate — to the incumbent president of the United States. But present circumstances have led me to draw a few parallels between cartoon characters and the dictatorial superhero Trump paints himself as.
It has been over a week now since the Trump administration captured Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and flew him to the United States to face drug charges. Keen to declare himself the acting president of Venezuela (or “Vene-wellas,” as he calls it), Trump has monitored Delcy Rodriguez’s interim government with forceful tactics redolent of his idol, Republican president William McKinley, and the late nineteenth-century “gunboat diplomacy” I learned about in university when studying American imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines. Drawing on his limited business lexicon, sounding like a Flintstones character caught off mic, Trump has told the president of Colombia to “watch [his] ass” and when asked about a potential invasion of Colombia, has been quoted as saying “sounds good to me.”
Reading all this, I could not help but think of a befuddled Fred Flintstone, mindlessly repeating the only three sentences he has been told. I only wish this was my parents’ living room and I could press pause on the remote control any time. Perhaps Mr. Trump sees the world through a reality TV show screen; jumping from one world region to the other and sparking trouble wherever he sees fit is, to him, like channel-hopping, and he can skip whenever he is bored, whenever he yawns and says, like the protagonist in the Peggy Lee song which in 2016 he called his favorite, “Is that all there is?”
Two things get in the way of my POTUS-Flintstone analogy, however: there has been no “great switcheroo” and Trump – to our knowledge – is not filling in for anyone else.
Secondly, I realize that he is only interested in one of the three sentences that Gotrocks’s henchmen feed Fred: “I’ll buy that.” Fill in the “that” with any direct grammatical object you like – these days, and for a few more to come, it is and will be Greenland.
The questions “whose baby is that?” and “what’s your angle?” are irrelevant to Trump’s reasoning. The first one he asks as a formality, knowing full well he will take credit for whatever good idea may come afterwards; the second one is totally obsolete, since the only angle he seems interested in is his own – and that, to him, is enough. His morality is the only factor that constrains him in his presidential actions, he recently disclosed to the New York Times, so the American people and the world had better get used to it.
