Do you remember that great scene from the 1972 classic Deliverance starting Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds? The ill-fated canoe trip starts with a stop in a hillbilly town where co-star Ronny Cox gets into a banjo duel with an inbred moon-faced country boy who can pick a mean banjo. I don’t know if the two are connected, but Charlie Daniels great banjo song The Devil Went Down to Georgia would seem to have almost been a recreation of that scene on the fiddle with Johnny resining up his bow to do battle with the devil.
I don’t think it’s totally coincidental that these two scenes are in my head this morning as I read about the Trump/Musk feud breaking out into the open as it has in the past day or two. My guess is that it’s not over yet. Musk is threatening shutting down SpaceX and StarLink and Trump is threatening to shut down Musk altogether with investigations and the canceling of contracts and subsides. The only problem with the analogy is that it’s hard to be sure who the moon-faced idiot savant is and who the devil is in this picture.
What is shocking to most sensible people is that this Rodin v. Godzilla match-up is about as ridiculous as the Tokyo movie roll makes that fight look on film. Musk is certainly an idiot savant with the savant part coming as he built Tesla and SpaceX in the first place and the idiot part coming as he bought Twitter and started stumping for DJT. Trump is equally an uncouth hillbilly in his speech patterns and general social skills. And both are reasonable candidates to be considered objectively to be satanic. And just to round out the full array of analogies, they are both ridiculous caricatures of the Godzilla-like creatures that stomp through our cities and our lives, wreaking unconscionable havoc on the innocent little people of the world just trying to get through their lives. Both are mindlessly destroying life as we know it, not just for us Americans (though we are their primary initial victims), but for all of humanity. How crazy is it that we are all being led by two guys who say things like let’s turn Gaza into a beach resort or if the going gets tough on earth, let’s just all move to Mars. You really can’t make this shit up, even in a Tokyo film studio.
As we have travelled the world these past few weeks, I have mostly stopped writing about politics. It’s all still been going on in all its craziness, but I’ve been distracted for perfectly good reasons. Now that the dueling banjos of Trump and Musk are too lows to ignore, I feel the need to comment. It’s the middle of the night here in Ithaca and there has been a thunderstorm raging most of the night. We are here to reunion with the last of the flower-power gang of the hippie 60’s (we were actually the early 70’s holdovers). We may have seen the end of Vietnam, lived through the stagflation of the 70’s, helped bring Reaganomics and its perverse economic upside down theories into play, pumped up liberal Clinton ideology with a dash of Lewinsky drama, allowed Bush 1 and 2 to have their way with Iraq, elected the first black man to the presidency…twice… and created the playing field for the billionaire elite, but that’s nothing compared to what we’ve created with Godzilla and Rodin picking banjos at one another while we turn our attention away from the atrocities of the world in favor of this pro wrestling smack-down. And here’s the worst part of this melodrama, I am NOT overstating how monstrously insane this has all become.
In the last days of the Roman Empire, the spectacles held at the Coliseum needed to get more and more outrageous and absurd to break through the sensibilities of the hangry mob. Bloodlust is such that it just goes from one extreme to another in an attempt to awaken otherwise dulled senses made impervious to the horrors underway and yet still hankering for more gore.
One can only hope that Godzilla and Rodin inflict mortal wounds on one another while us little people scurry for shelter, just glad that they are, for a moment, distracted from directly destroying our lives. Of course none of this stops the destruction of our world as they stomp around biting and clawing each other. And the likelihood is that they will both survive to go off and lick their wounds so they can fight another day. Meanwhile, we theater-goers are left to wonder which analogy best describes what we are witnessing. Is this just a banjo picking match among sociopaths? Or maybe an unholy duel for the soul of the human race? Or is it just another cheap movie set recreation of the battle of the titans? Whatever it is, I am glad to see the rip in the fabric of the rich, famous and immoral. I’m glad they are each saying about each other what we have all been saying all year and Fox News has been consciously denying. Neither Godzilla nor Rodin is redeemable in the least, so any damage done to either is useful to the greater good. I wish this all meant something in the grand scheme of things, but I fear that the dueling banjos are just a lot of noise. The devil has already won the souls of these two monsters, and now it’s up to us to figure out how we rebuild our society and get their carcasses off our front porch.
What oft was said but n’er si well expressed!