President Chance the Gardener

[Yet another rejected piece for American Thinker. There is one editor there who seems to hate everything I write. Luck of the draw, I guess. Or…dare I say it? This one might not be as good as my other work. I’ll let you decide, except I’ve added a few lines in this piece to juice it up. See Dr. Strangelove for more details.]

In 1980 when I was only twenty years old, I saw Being There for the first time and thought I was watching one of the most brilliant satires ever conceived. Peter Sellers starred in the film as Chance the Gardener, a barely functional illiterate with a talent for pruning roses and not much else. Chance learns everything he knows by watching television, which meant he knows practically nothing.

The film begins with Chance living at the estate of a wealthy benefactor who dies and leaves Chance homeless. Suddenly thrust into the real world for the first time, Chance wanders the streets of the Capitol and finds himself reduced to begging complete strangers to feed him but then a minor accident dramatically changes his fortune. A limousine chauffeuring around the wife of one of the most powerful men in Washington accidentally backs into Chance (who was distracted by watching himself on television) injuring his knee and the next thing we know, Chance is living in the home of an even wealthier benefactor, Ben Rand (played by Melvyn Douglas), and through Rand, gains access to the very highest levels of government. Even his name was the result of a miscommunication: when Chance identifies himself as “Chance the gardener”, Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine) misunderstands him and thinks his name is “Chauncey Gardiner”, and Chance is so dense that he doesn’t bother correcting her. 

People believe Chance is some sort of a brilliant thinker because they assume he’s speaking in metaphors when he’s actually being quite literal. Even the President (Jack Warden) is fooled into thinking Chance is a brilliant economic strategist and quotes him in a speech, only to have Chance appear on a late-night television show and make the President look like a fool for doing so. The film ends at the funeral of Ben Rand. His pall bearers are the biggest power brokers in Washington, and the President himself is delivering Ben’s eulogy. The power brokers are overheard whispering that the President is too bombastic, and they conspire to replace him with the political unknown, Chauncey Gardiner, only because he’s perceived to be a blank slate without any known skeletons in his closet and believed to be easily controllable. Meanwhile, as his future is being discussed by the power brokers, Chance wanders away from the funeral and stops to help a tree when he should be paying his last respects to Ben Rand. The very last scene in the movie was a perfect ending — it shows Chance walking across a pond, presumably succeeding only because he’s too dumb to understand that he shouldn’t be able to walk on water, while the power brokers are deciding whether he should become our next President. And presto! We’ve got President Puppet.

At the time Being There was made, the idea that something so preposterous could ever happen here in the United States defied the imagination. We were living in Reagan’s America. The adults were in charge. Today, more than forty years later, we’ve come full circle, and satire has become reality. Joe Biden is Chance the Gardener in real life. Once upon a time, the guy was only a dumb thief and a bad prevaricator. Now he’s corrupt, and senile to boot. The scariest thing in my mind is that he’s already started a proxy war with Russia and he’s got control of the nuclear football. Maybe a comparison to another Peter Sellers classic is in order: Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved the Bomb. Of course, there are a few key differences between a hypothetical Chance the Gardener presidency and Joe Biden. Chance became popular with the power brokers that control Washington because he was a complete blank slate, a total unknown. Joe Biden was chosen to run against Donald Trump merely because he wasn’t Donald Trump. The people manipulating Joe from behind the scenes managed to keep him hidden in the basement just long enough to manipulate the election results and ultimately win the White House.

By any means necessary, right?

Heck, if the media had remembered covering Joe’s presidential campaign in 1987 they could have reminded voters of Joe’s history of lying about his academic credentials, blaming an innocent man for his wife’s death purely for political gain, or plagiarizing speeches of other prominent politicians. We had lots of reasons not to vote for Joe before he’d become senile—could you imagine what the headlines would have been if it had been Trump who had given the eulogy for former KKK Exalted Cyclops and Democrat Senator Robert Byrd? The same people who treated Donald Trump as an honored guest to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 1998 and 1999 vilified him as a racist when the political winds changed directions, and it became more advantageous to demonize Trump than embrace him.

Now that Biden is Commander-in-Chief, we can get a glimpse of what a Chance the Gardener presidency might have looked like — for example, holding cue cards telling him when to sit and what to say. Handlers rush the media out of the room before anyone can ask Joe a question, because they can’t afford to have him wander off script. They even set up a fake Oval Office across the street from the real Oval Office just so Biden could read from his teleprompter whenever he had to give a speech to the American people. He’s a has been who never was.

Someone, whether it be a family member or White House staff, must always be lurking at Joe’s elbow to keep him from saying something dumb or incriminating – it might even be the Easter Bunny, but somebody’s always got to have Joe’s back when the media is nearby, even though the media is typically complicit in covering for Biden. Joe can’t remember what he said from one day to the next. Heck, on some days, Joe can’t even remember what he said from the previous sentence to the next. 

The new Department of Energy hire is a non-binary drag queen. The Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services used to be a man named Richard Leland Levine who now claims to be a four-star admiral named Rachel (serving in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, whatever that’s supposed to be.)  Biden’s Vice President was chosen strictly based on her gender and skin color, and the same can be said for the woman he just named to the Supreme Court.  The White House Press Secretary is black and lesbian—she’s terrible at her job, but she does check multiple boxes on the political correctness score sheet.

The Practically everyone Biden has appointed or tries to appoint has been chosen based on gender, skin color, or sexual orientation. Nobody seems to have been selected based on their qualifications for doing their job. Joe used to only be dumb and corrupt, but the cue cards and other telltale signs imply that now Joe’s senile, too. We have a President of the United States who is mentally incompetent and incapable of leading our nation.

Chance the Gardener frequently said, “I like to watch,” which meant that he liked to watch television. Our mentally challenged President Joe Biden could say instead, “I like to sniff,” meaning he likes to inappropriately smell little kids. Our president is a creepy guy. 

I used to think the movie Being There was one of the funniest and most brilliant satires I’d ever seen. I now finally realize the truth — it’s a horror movie.