Even before Donald Trump entered the political scene — after the Republicans, desperate to retake the White House, accepted him, only very dimly aware that he would change their Old Party forever — there have been apocalyptic conspiracy theories, and the dedicated Apocalypticists have, in the immortal words of Walt Kelly, met the Enemy and it is us.
For three nights in a row, the Republicans, at their unvirtuous convention, have been telling their increasingly dwindling number of supporters that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will surely bring The Apocalypse to this exceptional nation.
So, we here at AP have dutifully arranged with American Zoetrope, the producer of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic film drama, Apocalypse Now, to bring back that famous 1979 film, and move the action to Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Apocalypse Now is loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, which takes place along the immensely long Congo River. At that time, what we now know as the Democratic Republic of the Congo was the private preserve of the King of Belgium, so he could do with it whatever he wanted — and he did.
Meaning that Kurtz, a white European trader who installed himself far, far upriver, and set himself up as an ivory trader controlling an entire village of indigenous peoples, became a little emperor who persuades his villagers to worship him.
Marlow, the narrator, is sent by the Brussels-based trading company to go far upriver, find Kurtz, and bring the renegade back to Europe, to his Intended, but the frightened villagers attack the arriving party with lethal arrows.
But Kurtz dies in the village and, as T S Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men (1925), the "manager’s boy" tells Marlow, “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”
Focusing on the American Disaster known as the Vietnam War, Coppola et al. cast a bloated, depraved Marlon Brando as Kurtz, and a young Martin Sheen as Benjamin Willard (Conrad’s Marlow) in the film.
At the outset of his highly illegal expedition into Laos, Sheen is told by a jaded CIA operative what to do once he finds Kurtz: “Terminate, with extreme prejudice” — the only words spoken by actor Jerry Ziesmer.
Inspired by all this, we sent our intrepid team of associate solitary reporters to RNC headquarters and told them to go straightaway to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where they are tasked with observing the Unbelievable: that Donald Trump, instead of delivering an unacceptable Acceptance Speech from his Oval Office this evening, will, instead, travel by Marine Force One to Kenosha, where he will get up on top of a Hummer and tell the throngs of ultra white nationalists who are there in support of The Police, that he, Donald Trump, is their Savior.
Associate solitary reporter Sherman is preparing an exquisite documentary of the event, which is sure to get an Oscar.