In the movie Daddy
Long Legs, Fred Astaire’s character (Jervis Pendleton III) stumbles upon an
orphanage in the French countryside while on some goodwill mission, and he
decides he wants to adopt Leslie Caron’s character, an 18-year-old orphan. He
asks the US Ambassador to France how he can do it, and the Ambassador scoffs at
the idea, citing her age and how it would look, adding: “Jervis, do you have
any idea how easy it is to lose a job at the State Department these days?”
When I heard that line of dialogue, I burst out laughing.
My, how times have changed! Apparently the only way to lose a job at the State
Department nowadays is to be a whistleblower about their incompetence and
corruption.
But after all, the movie is just a fictional story, so you
can’t really take it seriously. But our current reality is way more absurd and
surreal than any fictional story.
This is Daddy Long
Legs:
