Gilbert to the Rescue and Bring Sullivan Too

These are indeed the times that try men’s souls. Thank you, Tom Paine. I couldn’t have said it better. Trump has so poisoned the well I have taken cover listening to Gilbert & Sullivan operettas to clear my head. 

It hasn’t worked. He shadows me wherever I turn. Here’s a pretty mess / In two months or less / Trump may be the one who’s heading / Let the bitter tears I’m shedding / Witness my distress / Here’s a pretty mess. And to think  his candidacy started out as a source of innocent merriment.

If the lord-high executioner is elected Mikado it will be a self-inflicted punishment that exceeds the crime. Collective electile dysfunction results in unaroused voters with a limp turnout and lethal inattention. 

However unconsummated, the marriage cannot be annulled. Even if he were to come in second I expect we’d hear, not a concession speech, but his, It was rigged speech. He will sue the states he lost, call the voters stupid losers and summon the militia to take back the government from the cheaters and liars. He may even ask Putin to send his troops to assist.

When he was a lad did he even serve one term as office boy / in anyone’s firm, / clean the windows and sweep the floor / or polish up the handle on the big front door? Did he polish up that handle so assiduously / that now he is running for the presidency?

I need G & S to set this past year in perspective as a comic opera. Not comic, you say. Neither was British imperialism or their treatment of suffragettes or their supercilious court system. Win or lose, I’m afraid America has been Trumped. He has uncaged that latent beast.

In Iolanthe we are told, Every boy and every girl / Born into this world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative. He is neither. His foul tongued grandiosity has legitimatized a new breed of mindless mendacity we’ve not seen before. 

It’s as if a short song in Rudigore was written for him. If you wish in the world to advance / Your merits you’re bound to enhance / You must stir it and stump it / And blow your own trumpet / Or trust me you’ll never advance.

He’s got a little list… as that someday it may happen that a victim must be found / he’s got a little list /…… of society offenders who might well be underground / he’s got them on his list and they’ve none of us be missed.

We have a sizable chunk of voters who can’t seem to make up their minds. One wonders if they have minds to make up. In the short operetta, Trial By Jury, Edwin, the love-sick boy, put it this way. You cannot eat breakfast all day / Nor is it the act of a sinner / When breakfast is taken away / To turn his attention to dinner / But this I am willing to say / If it will appease her sorrow / I’ll marry this lady today / And I’ll marry the other tomorrow.

Let us hope the misinformation which the misinformed feast on will either wake them up from their slumber or cause them to stay home. That’s our How–de-do !