PRESIDENT DONALD RICARDO

The fact that Donald Trump surrogate, for now, Harvey Weinstein is considering the Mad Men era casting couch defense reveals to me as much about him as it does our current commander and cheat.

It will be Harvey’s contention that the way that Hollywood works is not unlike the way Nobel Peace Prize contender/art of the deal expert Donald Trump negotiates with Kim Jung Un.  You fuck me. I fuck you.  We both get what we want.

In so many ways the entire Trump Presidency has been firmly rooted in the 1950s where it was a woman’s dream to marry a rich man in exchange for the perfect life.  Sex was something that was done to you and your job was to lie down and be a cooperative, mute, breeding machine. The man was the king of the castle who went out into his man’s world, paid his man bills, watched his man sports, drove his man car, smoke his man cigars and deal with zero man emotions until his heart finally exploded not with a bang but a whimper.

Just like today the 1950’s was also about paranoia and a burning just below the surface hostility which was about to go off like a Hiroshima bomb.

The paranoia part of the program was brought to you by Senator Joe McCarthy and his slithering sidekick and future Trump mentor, the self-loathing, closeted homosexual Roy Cohn, who destroyed innocent lives by making America great again by ridding us of anyone who did not act and think exactly like us.  Evil had a name and a face, just like the Trump brand of Mexicans, which made it really easy for the easily duped to join the mob, grab their Statue of Liberty torches and be blinded by the light of the right.

We feared. We worried.  We lived with air raid sirens and duck and cover drills, which casually reminded we first graders that we could be incinerated within a matter of blinding flash seconds.  So enjoy Howdy Doody!

Communism and sexual repression reached pandemic levels until Elvis came along and set our nether regions free.  Rock and roll made every day Hump Day, took stimulation out of our hands, lifted women right off the top of their Kenmore dryers and turned dancing into a publicly expressed, bandstand broadcast, sexual ritual release.  The rebels finally had a cause.

Rock was raw. Insistent. Primitive.  It was for white American kids what jazz was for the college crowd.  It was our way of co-opting black culture and making it our own which made it white and right.   Kind of like buying season tickets today for an NBA team.

On TV, Lucy rebelled and acted outrageously like no other woman would dare.  True to the fifties, she always had to learn her lesson, which evidently was completely discarded in a matter of days.  Oh, those daffy dames.

But while some would argue that Lucy was not the world’s best role model, the truth was, it was in itself, the early stirrings of the revolution to come.

We were on the launch pad of the drug-fueled rocked ship that was the sixties to come, which was the fifties not so much on steroids but LSD.   The moon was just within our reach.  Bras were about to be burned and women were about to find their voice and speak their mind.  Edith meet Archie.

There is good news for us because life being a circular thing has brought us right back to this point once again

We are on the precipice of amazing change and self-empowerment that few feel right now.  But my heartfelt message to you is take a long look back to see exactly where we are headed.

The #metoo movement is a seismic shift for our times as is the anti-murder of children movement initiated by the Parkland survivors.

More women are about to run for public office than any other time in history.

Nothing could be more emblematic of the new permanent wave, than the perp walk shot of Harvey Weinstein, a child of the fifties, smirking his way to a waiting perpmobile, escorted by a pair of no-nonsense male and female police officers.  Who has the handcuffs now?

Bill Cosby, a hero to so many of us, was difficult to watch. But the I like to Spy guy, now heading for Jail-o, is also a sign of the times.

The message is loud and clear:  a revolution is not coming.  

It’s here.

The more Trump continues to treat us all like 1950’s housewives, the more that he acts like a cheating, lying, abusive husband, the deeper he is digging his own grave.  That whole smug, I’m rich so I can get away with anything attitude is what we saw quickly evaporating off the slumped shoulders of the staggered looking, Ben Grim doppelgänger, Harvey Weinstein.

It’s the same experience that we had watching  Mike Flynn,, who famously lead the “lock her up” chant, as he was lead by his defense lawyers to the courthouse, while the crowd chanted, “Lock him up.”

Paul Manafort swatting away photographers like mosquitos en route to his getaway car?   Nice.

Michael Cohn trying to get to his cab, looking like he just realized that he forgot to put on his pants?  So deeply satisfying.

Jared Kushner or Don Jr, on their apres interrogation, walks, both looking like dazed four-year-olds leaving the dentist’s office?   Great.

The men mighty fall. 

Mussolini.  Hitler. Gaddafi.  Hussein.  Al Capone.  Martin Shkreli. Mark Zuckerberg. Those wonderful guys who brought you Volkswagen and Wells Fargo.

There is no greater feeling than watching supposed tough guys be reduced to stammering incarcerated Elmer Fudds. 

In Trump’s case, for now, he is less a formidable foe as he is the hapless star of a 1950’s sitcom.  

But he is not Ricky.  

He is Lucy, the ultimate Republican (for now) red-head star of The House of Ricardos, whose buffoonish antics are nothing more than a spastic, laughable effort to either mingle with or be as powerful as William Holden or John Wayne which is doomed because he is such a clown.   No matter what he tries, no matter what he does, he is guaranteed to fail.  

Donald Ricardo will do whatever it takes to get what he wants. He will lie, never take responsibility for anything, never admit his culpability, blame everyone else and destroy people’s lives and will be incapable of remembering any kind of lesson learned.  In one short week, he will fuck up again.  And he will have his sidekick, the clueless Ethel Giuliani to help fuck things up even more.

And just like Lucy, it’s just a matter of time before the network of prosecutors cancels his show.  After all, he had been suffering from low ratings for years.

The only way to learn from all this is to watch the repeats, over and over again (not on Fox) so history cannot do the same thing.

Try not to forget that.