Casablanca’s lesson for America today by Sherman Yellen

It is remarkable what we can learn from a great movie, even if that movie had no idea that it was great at the time it was filmed. The characters in Casablanca appear (for me) to have their counterparts in our world today. And it may be worth finding the lesson that lies within it.

Let’s start with its hero, Bogart’s Rick Blaine. Like so many of us, he has done his best to fight the good fight in the past — in his case the Spanish Civil War; in the case of many of us elders, the fight against the Vietnam war and the fight for civil rights. All Rick wants is to avoid another engagement in another fight, although he knows the difference between the good guys and the bad guys in his corrupt little world.

Alas, there are many Ricks in our world, still nursing old wounds, until an old love, the marvelous Ingrid aka Ilsa arrives to shake him up and ask him to love again — in our case to love not an old flame but a constant love: democracy. Ilsa may be the stand-in for the America that we all loved, and who has disappointed us but who we can never forget.

And there are those of us like Paul Henried — the heroic, never say die, champion of democracy Victor Laszlo, who will not run from the battle and will fight on at any cost. We have Claude Rains, the corrupt Louis Renault — you can pick any of the current GOP congressmen and women to play him. And then we have the entrance of Conrad Veidt, the fascist Major Heinrich Strasser who has come to Casablanca to round up the usual suspects. And here we have a choice — our unnamable President or his cohort, the unspeakably heartless billionaire who has stopped aid to starving children in Africa and is doing the same for hungry schoolchildren in our own country. And the usual suspects to be rounded up are those refugees with brown skin who sought freedom from tyranny in our country. Much as our own ancestors did.

Today we have atrocities in the name of economy — in this case economy is another name for replacing democracy with fascism. Rick may be slow to enter the fray but he does so — in the film it is the French anthem that the lovely Madeleine Lebeau as Yvonne sings over the Nazi one that appears to awaken him — and of course there is Ilsa to remind him of who he was, and the loyal Sam who remembers the good Rick.

But what matters in the film, as in life, is not what brings us into the battle against evil but that we awaken and join in that battle, sometimes with a lawsuit and a ballot but never with a bullet.