Margotlog: Trump's Cabaret

Margotlog: Trump's Cabaret

Several weeks ago, we rented the 1972 movie Cabaret set in Berlin, Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. The naughty, insinuating face of Cabaret master of ceremonies Joel Grey rouses in me a cheap, nasty thrill of disobedience and slummyness. Writing soon after the movie's release, Pauline Kael called Joel Gray in the role a "devil-doll" which his intoxicating, leering nastiness,. On the music hall makeshift stage, scantily clad women strut around, showing their boobs, or belting out "Mein Herr," with Liza Minnelli, the Kit Kat Club star dancer/singer. But she's ultimately an American girl gone astray who'll get herself pregnant by a bisexual Brit student, and (shockingly for the time) have an abortion. Yes, her love-affair gone awry adds to the atmosphere of limits and decorum being breached, and though trenchant stuff for the era, it's not what makes my blood run cold today.

It's the SHOW, the Cabaret performances. As the secondary plot evolves, with a young German Jew trying to pass himself off as a pure-blood Protestant but falling in love with a Jewish heiress, and shedding his disguise to marry her, Joel Gray dances and sings with a costumed ape--"if you could see her as I do...she wouldn't look Jewish at all." It's his leer at the audience that rouses complicity and a thrill of defiling tabus which ultimately both rouses joy and alarm.

So why does Cabaret make me think of the Trump Act that's threatening to swamp the Republican party, and in another horrifying possibility, give him the presidency? What was it about the Nazis that helped them rise to power, setting aside the Wiemar Republic and vote in Hitler? As in Cabaret, it was their SHOW. The spectacle, first of a uniformed young blond man singing in a tea garden "Tomorrow belongs to me," with all the lyric loveliness of yearning youth until that yearning becomes insistent and ends with everyone in the audiences shouting in triumph. "Tomorrow will belong to me or by God, I'll trample all convention and borders, all warlike codes and prisoner rehabilitation into the dust." Gradually when men with such attitudes infiltrate every level of society, when their uniformed bodies fill the audience in the Cabaret, march through the streets, raise their hands in automaton salute, and shout in ecstatic, shameless power, "Heil Trump," then we might as well pack our bags and flee to Canada.

We have decided today that Germany's defeat in World War I, and the huge reparations demanded of the country, already heading toward economic collapse, helped to fuel the Nazi rise. But that doesn't explain how in disheveled defiance, a large white millionaire (billionaire) with disorderly hair can thrill and titillate American audiences into supporting outrageous shots and promises that will trample not just common sense but good will. That will send millions of Americans "back" from where they came, that will build fences along hundreds of miles, that will BRAND and no doubt ultimately imprison in ruthless camps, those deemed "OTHER." 

I personally can't bear watching Trump. But there are millions of Americans (mostly white) who rise shouting to their feet at his unashamed abuse. Who suck it up like a substance they've craved for a very long time, and here he is, finally giving it to them. They and their master of ceremonies seem not afraid at all of the horror he may well be unleashing. It's time we all found a copy of Cabaret and watched it with ourselves in mind. As anyone who reads about the German Holocaust well knows, though German concentration camps murdered millions of Jews and "Others," and though the German armed forces fought long years against the Allies, Germany was ultimately decimated by World War II. Today German leader Angela Merken has led her country to open its borders to thousands of Middle Eastern refugees. It is an act of contrition for acts of unspeakable brutality, years and years ago, but not forgotten.