"We need to see the pool from the casino"

There are days, in any pundit's
life, when he frets whether he's
committed himself to the wrong
avatar for his favorite figure
of satire. Our American Presid-
ent, long may he flap, cast him-
self so endearingly candidly in
the Primaries and the Final Heat
as a helplessly craven debauché
of age 15 at military school, we
dubbed him, Donny Thump-Thump, at
no foreseeable risk of revision.

To our chagrin, who on Earth had
foretold his appropriation of the
mantle of Benjamin Siegel, "Bugsy" 
to the social-climbing, in no more
than an hour upon touching down
in the desert to unfold his para-
dise? Undergraduate film societies
and willing slaves to portable de-
vices suddenly leapt to the screen-
play of James Toback, recovering
gambler himself, for Warren Beatty
and director Barry Levinson's im-
mortal Genesis epic, Bugsy (1990). 

As the great President - indeed,
the most great, the most massive -
proclaimed that his border wall on
the glittering casino of liberty
and justice for all must, must,
he flagellantly underscored, have
a window upon the talent pool be-
ing denied entry for lack of loot
or influence among friends, such 
as Nordic flesh, dance hall legs,
or steamer trunks of rubles to
rinse in his desolate condominia,
cinéastes of devout reverence for
precedent began to recall that
earlier desert boondoggle, the
Flamingo in Vegas. And what a
cash drain it was upon the Treas-
ury, as Benny continually fret-
ted the lack of grandeur in his
monument, the lack of requisite
enviability, to justify the name
of country.

The unsheltered must be surtaxed,
as night follows day, for a header
beam between the casino and the
imploring pool beyond, to mount
a sheath of glazing fit for awe
and wonder, beyond any splitting
bodice one could rip.

We forbear to recall how all that
worked out, as some volunteering
Second Amendment people rose to
virtue's own primordial summons
- wink-wink, lecherously aside -
to perfect Benjamin's martyrdom.
We'd be just as glad to laud the
pulp-bred exhortations of our sage
as adequate, for curdling's sake.

But maybe, as Virginia says, he's
just getting old.