Friday
I am still amazed at the Covid relief package passed by Congressional Democrats, which will have a significant impact on the lives of suffering Americas. I see the absolute necessity of Democrats fanning out and explaining the different ways it will help people. Hungry families will be fed, people will escape eviction, patients will be able to afford medical help, school children will be able to return safely to school.
One line Democrats are using amuses me, however, accurate though it is: “Help is on the way!” I can’t help but think of how the line is delivered at the end of the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, in my opinion their best film and most anarchistic film.
Finding his bunker surrounded by hostile forces, Groucho, as leader of Fredonia, sends out a desperate radio call for help. In response, we hear someone announce, “Help is on the way,” at which point we see a montage of forces apparently riding to the rescue. These include fire engines roaring out of their stations, motorcycle brigades riding down highways, rowing crews frantically sprinting towards the finish line, swimmers diving off piers, baboons swarming across a rope bridge, elephants charging across the savannah, and schools of dolphins leaping through the waves. It’s an altogether fitting end to the film.
For that matter, the war they are fighting has been declared in a Parliamentary session that resembles the chaos of Congress on January 6, albeit without the violence. Confusion reigns supreme until help shows up and Fredonia emerges triumphant. “We’re fighting for this woman’s honor, which is more than she ever did,” Groucho says of Margaret Dumont as Duck Soup careens to its conclusion.
I started thinking of literary stories where help miraculously arrives in (to quote Rocky and Bullwinkle) the nick of time. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” came instantly to mind.
The tale is the ultimate claustrophobe’s nightmare (although “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” are close seconds). Between a dark dungeon, a deep well, walls that heat up and close in, rats that swarm and bite, and a sharpened pendulum that slowly descends upon the bound victim, the Spanish Inquisition has fashioned an excruciating torture for the narrator. No sooner does he extricate himself from one danger than another presents itself.
A couple of weeks ago I compared life in the time of Covid to Jean Valjean’s sewer journey in Les Misérables. Poe’s tale presents us with its own parallels since we’ve found ourselves caught between the pit of the virus and the pendulum of unemployment and bankruptcy.
Fortunately, “help is on the way!” At the very moment we were about to be driven into the pit, the vaccines and the Covid relief bill have come riding in like the French army. Poe’s story ends thus:
I shrank back—but the closing walls pressed me resistlessly onward. At length for my seared and writhing body there was no longer an inch of foothold on the firm floor of the prison. I struggled no more, but the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and final scream of despair. I felt that I tottered upon the brink—I averted my eyes—
There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.
Or, for us, in the hands of the scientists, doctors and Democrats.
