Every now and then this column dials up the movie Casablanca to get a read on how America is doing in the world. Casablanca, set in the city of that name in 1940, involves the frantic efforts of refugees from war-torn Europe to escape to America and freedom from fascism. The action, as we so well know, centers in Rick’s Cafe Americain. “Everybody comes to Rick’s,” and it does seem that everybody is there.
Rick himself, a hard-bitten, cynical saloon keeper says, “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Even so, his place provides welcome respite for refugees and also draws the attention of the local prefect de police, along with a visiting Nazi major with his entourage, and a world-renowned freedom fighter who has escaped the Nazis and is attempting to find papers that will allow him and his wife to emplane for Lisbon and thence to America, where he can continue his resistance.
Of course his wife turns out to be Rick’s one true love, from their days in Paris before the war and before she learned that her husband was not dead, as she had believed when she fell in love with Rick. Naturally, when she found out her husband was still alive, she had to go to him and leave Rick waiting at the station to get the train out of Paris as the Nazis came in. That’s why Rick is so bitter and such a mean drunk.
Not a bad plot, huh? Especially since Rick has the papers that would get husband and wife the hell out of Casablanca. But that’s just the Hollywood stuff. The real story is the refugees, played by actors who were real victims of the Nazis’ real conquest of their real homelands. In the movie, in Casablanca they try to find a way out, and “they wait, and wait, and wait.”
So, well, what would they be waiting for today, in their earnest desire to reach the freedom of the Americas? Alligator Alcatraz, the new swamp prison in the Florida Everglades, surrounded by reptiles of all sizes, heat, humidity, mosquitoes and Florida men. The lucky ones might be deported to the concentration camp in El Salvador or to Sudan or Louisiana. Or they could be accidentally killed by ICE thugs. Whatever fate awaits them in America, they would be better off to listen to Rick: “You want my advice? Go back to Bulgaria.”
America has allocated an additional $170 billion to greatly expand the ranks of the ICE stormtroopers and to keep refugees out and send those already here to the swamps and hellholes. The Statue of Liberty, if it is not repossessed by France, will no doubt soon proclaim, “Give me your white, your rich, your yachtsmen yearning to breathe fumes, the oligarchs of your teeming shore. Send these, the fat cats, untouched by tempest to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door for those who bring more gold.”
In truth, the plot of Casablanca falls apart. Nobody at Rick’s place has any desire anymore to escape to America because America has become a police state, just like their home countries under the Nazis. Even if they score “letters of transit” and make it to Lisbon and on to America, they will continually be in danger of being ripped off the street by masked, armed operatives and deported or incarcerated or both without any right to establish their legality.
There’s nothing for them in America. American citizens themselves are no longer guaranteed their right to breathe free. If we dissent, if we oppose the government’s administrative orders, if we insist on our Constitutional right to free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to live and marry as we wish, freedom to protest when our government is in the wrong, we, too, can be wrestled to the ground, handcuffed and incarcerated without so much as a court hearing.
The America depicted in Casablanca no longer exists. Our Constitution is ignored, our institutions have failed, our leadership is corrupt. We the People are all we have left. It is up to us to continue resisting in mass protests, at the ballot box and in regard for our immigrant friends, in spite of the fact that we could be next when ICE rounds up the usual suspects.
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