Trump the gardener

This is a story about the star that fell on Alabama Friday night.

Mixing his movies and metaphors, the super-modified and real-life adaptation of Chauncey Gardiner ventured to Sweet Home Alabama.

There he showed off his low-flying jet airplane and pandered transparently to assert his devotion to the Bible and college football.

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The raging phenomenon of Donald Trump is a very broad and highly imaginative embellishment of the novella and movie called Being There.

In that Jerzy Kosinski story, a developmentally stunted live-in gardener named Chance has nowhere to go after his employer dies. So he wanders the streets.

All he knows beyond gardening is what he's seen on television.

Naturally, he ends up a celebrated national icon called Chauncey Gardiner, which is what someone mistakenly hears when Chance presents himself as "Chance the gardener." He gets a book contract, stands to succeed a tycoon on Wall Street and emerges as a presidential adviser perhaps bound for the presidency himself.

It happens because Chance is wearing one of his late employer's good suits and speaks with the powerful currency of vague and faux profundity.

He says you must have a seed and you must give it water and food and sunlight and then it will grow.

He's talking about a seed and water and fertilizer and sunlight. But everyone gives him credit for a brilliant metaphor and uncommon international economic insight.

Trump also wears a nice suit. He, too, speaks with vague and faux profundity.

He says he will build a wall and keep illegal immigrants out. He says it's that simple. So people listen and believe, because he knows how to build things. Trump Tower, hotels, casinos, golf courses, a wall too tall for immigrants to climb--they're all the same.

Trump says he will negotiate our adversaries into submission and that he'll make Mexico build and pay for that wall. He says it's that simple. And people listen and believe, because they've seen this domineering dealmaker bark "you're fired" to hapless victims on television.

Trump wonders aloud when it was that the United States last beat Japan at anything. There's likely a difference on that with Chance, who has probably seen World War II movies on TV.

Trump owes all that he is to images sent through the television screen. Chance owes all that he knows beyond gardening to images received through that screen. These characters are co-dependent.

But Trump is mean where Chance is clueless.

Chance tells the amorously intended woman that he only wants to watch, by which he means not her, but the television beaming over her shoulder.

There's no telling what Trump would tell her.

Unlike Chance, Trump intends what he is accomplishing, which, I am thinking increasingly, is a spoof on American culture, politics, media and conservatism.

Trump is no Manchurian candidate. But he is something similarly insidious. He's an American candidate of the lowest common denominator.

On Friday this cultural icon of New York City buzzed his jet low over a collegiate football stadium in Mobile. Mouth-gaped disciples numbering nearly 30,000 were gathered in all their primitive glory to hail the builder of the wall and the terminator of lesser men.

The New York Times found a man in the crowd who said he hoped Trump would make the Mexican border a vacation spot for hunters that awarded money for confirmed kills of those who tried to cross.

The Washington Post found a man selling a newspaper that assailed "black-on-white crime," "occupied media" and the "censored" version of the Holocaust.

So there's another movie that comes to mind. It is called Idiocracy. An average Joe goes 500 years into the future and is the smartest man in a dumbed-down world. All the plants are dying and no one knows why.

But it may be that the man from the past can save the world. He knows about applying water. He's Chance the gardener.

The last time a cultural icon of New York City made such a splash in Alabama was when Candice Bergen breezed down for McDreamy's and Reese Witherspoon's wedding in the film Sweet Home Alabama.

And that, by the way, was the Lynyrd Skynyrd anthem that was playing as Trump took the stadium stage shortly after his jet had breezed the stadium.

Candice got cold-cocked. That hasn't happened to Trump--yet.

But it may.

I look for it to happen at that moment Trump rises to accept the Republican presidential nomination and reveals that the joke is on us.

Some furious conservative--Tom Cotton, maybe--will go upside Trump's head with a right hook. He'll do so to defend the honor of contemporary American conservatism against this cynical plot by which the right wing will have inadvertently exposed its gullibility.

So here's the problem Trump poses for the contemporary American right wing: If people start getting the jokes, they might stop electing them.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.