Looking for the Letters of Transit
Sam’s Piano was sold at auction the other day. That’s the
Sam’s Piano, the one from which Dooley Wilson serenaded Ilsa and Rick in Casablanca, the one where the Letters of
Transit were hidden in plain sight.
The little upright and stool, mounted under a protective
shield (can you imagine someone sitting down to actually tickle those ivories)
went for $3.2 Million, and you can well understand why. There is something about Casablanca that holds our attention and our loyalty, something
about it that doesn’t age. It’s hokey,
it’s improbable, and it has just about every cliché we’ve come to love, and
repeat, and giggle over. One of my
favorite reviews was by Pauline Kael, who claimed, "It's far from a great
film, but it has a special appealingly schlocky romanticism...” Whenever I come
across that, my thought is always some variation of “enjoy your snotty elitism”
(or something less printable…)
It was a serendipitous coincidence that the New York Times
ran a story about the auction on the same day that the conservative columnist David
Brooks published The Unifying Leader. Brooks strikes me increasingly as a lost
soul, unable to find an intellectual home in a Republican Party that has become
fiercely anti-intellectual. Not that
he’s in the least bit interested in being a Democrat. But, if you asked Brooks, privately, what he
thought of the GOP of Palin, Bachmann, and Stockman he might point you in the
direction of Irving Kristol, considered a founder of neo-conservatism and a man
of great intellectual depth, and his sophomoric son, William Kristol, who
trades off his father’s name and makes an industry out of vacuous
rabble-rousing. Irving is gone, and Bill
is not, and Brooks has run out of kindred spirits. He needs an emotional bridge to the next
President, and we need one as well.
What Brooks wants is a “collaborative leader,” someone who
has “rejected the heroic, solitary model of leadership. He doesn’t try to
dominate his organization as its all-seeing visionary, leading idea generator
and controlling intelligence.”
To paraphrase, collaborative leaders share certain
qualities; they create a culture of collaboration and not competition, they
tone down the partisanship, they bring multiple interest groups to the table in
drafting and enacting important legislation and look for bold solutions, not
tepid compromise, they empower groups to come up with solutions by giving them
responsibility without micromanaging, they place themselves as a center of
gravity, an honest broker between extremes, they understand that the
sausage-making process can be messy but the mess is less relevant than the
result. What Brooks also craves is a
leader with the strength of ego to have a thick skin about the slings and
arrows thrown his way, mixed with a certain ruthlessness when it comes cutting
people from the herd, regardless of their talents, when they simply refuse to
play well with others.
Brooks’ piece is interesting in that it’s completely
non-partisan, beyond the inevitable tacit conclusion we draw that the person he
describes is to be found nowhere in Washington—particularly in the White
House. But I also think it's an exercise
in worship of an ideal that has never existed in history, a hagiographic
rendering of a wise Philosopher-King such as Marcus Aurelius, who embraced
Stoicism and was informed by it as a ruler.
Brooks is being impractical. The type of leader he describes has been
President only in bits and pieces—FDR’s “first class temperament” and Reagan’s
sunny self-assurance, Lincoln’s extraordinary sense of purpose, Jefferson’s
intellect, LBJ’s cat-herding ability, etc.
Look out at the current cast of 2016 aspirants, and you don’t see anyone
projecting those types of strength.
And, I think Brooks is wrong. We really don’t want a collaborative leader. She isn’t going to be able to get anything
done—likely sabotaged by ideologues on both sides of the aisle or held hostage
by nihilists who prefer scorched Earth to any type of compromise.
Rather, I think many of us are looking for something out of Casablanca—a reluctant but tough
warrior, someone who can tell the difference between right and wrong,
regardless of which side it comes from, someone just world-weary enough to be
able to make the right decision even when it involves personal sacrifice.
We don’t want Victor Laszlo, a man who, having recently
escaped from a concentration camp, shows up remarkably healthy and impeccably
dressed at Rick’s Café. It's an
interesting bit of trivia that Paul Henreid, who plays Laszlo, didn’t want the
role because he felt it showed him as stiff—he was right, Laszlo may be “the
leader of a great movement” but he leaves us cold and uninvolved. Watch Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa in the great
“dueling songs” scene, where Laszlo leads the band, and eventually the crowd,
in "La Marseillaise." Her
beautiful face registers admiration and concern, not love.
We certainly don’t want Louis Renault, the gleefully corrupt
and libidinous local Vichy Captain.
Given some of the best lines in the movie, Claude Rains is wonderfully
suave and witty. He would make a great
Senator, charming and cajoling, happily patting backs and taking bribes, but
he’s not the right man for the top job.
It’s Rick, or Richard, as Ilsa called him when they were in
Paris. The very embodiment of embittered
rationalism when we first meet him, hurt to the core when Ilsa arrives with Victor,
we see him show exquisite compassion to the beautiful young East European woman who, out of love,
is willing to do anything (including sleep with Captain Renault) to escape with
her husband. We watch him wrestle with
his emotions, marinate himself in self-pity, then, after Ilsa's explanation and
confession of continued love forces him to confront his own pain, rouse himself
to give everything up and plan Victor and Ilsa’s escape. It's the right thing to do, for himself, and for the world.
Rick isn't David Brooks’ ideal. He is not a collaborative leader at all—he’s
a loner who didn’t convene committees or hold community-building exercises
before moving decisively.
But he might just be our kind of guy—the one with the
Letters of Transit, the one who can take us from being stranded in Casablanca
to a better place.
For my next President, I’d like to see a little FDR, and a
little LBJ, and a little Jefferson and a generous dollop of Lincoln and even a
dash of Reagan. But I’m also rooting for
just a touch of Rick.
Find
that person, regardless of the party he or she belongs to, and it might be the
beginning of a beautiful friendship.
November 30, 2014
Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)
https://twitter.com/SyncPol
