Is this a great country or what?

I know what you’re thinking. We have a race-baiting, amateur autocrat as president, despite having lost the popular vote. He’s done nothing to handle immigration humanely, keep infrastructure from rotting, enemies from stealing our intellectual property and elections, oligarchs from turning us into a nation of serfs, deficits from eating our economy alive, or climate change from making our species and a million others extinct.

All true, but it could be worse. I just got to write those sentences, for example. That is, freedom of speech and the press have survived, and to prove it, guess who’s been nominated for an Emmy for Short Form Variety Series on YouTube?

Wait a minute! Stuff on YouTube now qualifies for an Emmy, an award to recognize excellence in television arts and sciences? Since when is the home of videos of your cat or baby or drunken brother falling off the roof of the garage worthy of comparison with “Game of Thrones,’ “Chernobyl,” and “Frontline?” Since somebody at the Emmy’s noticed YouTube also contains “The Randy Rainbow Show.”

In song parodies that owe more to the lyrical wit of Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart than Weird Al, he mocks Trump and his minions and the news media that covers them. The Broadway composers whose songs he often re-tailors are fans, including Stephen Sondheim who has praised his verbal dexterity.

Rainbow’s greatest hits now include “If You Ever Get Impeached” to the tune of “If I Only Had A Brain,” He’s In Love and We’re All Gonna Die” (“A Wonderful Guy” from “South Pacific”), “Trumps Favorite Things” (“tyrants and traitors and climate deniers”), “A Very Stable Genius” (Gilbert and Sullivan’s model of a modern Major General”), and “Super Careless, Fragile Ego, Extra Braggadocios” from “Mary Poppins.”

We take it or granted that a clever parodist steeped in show tunes and filled with snarky irreverence for the man called POTUS could suddenly become an internet sensation, but if Trump had the kind of power he envies in Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un, Rainbow would have been packed off to the Gulag or vanished without a trace some time ago. Many of the great cabaret satirists of Weimar Germany disappeared into the camps when the Nazis came to power or were forced to flee the country.

Not here, or a least not yet. Instead, the news provides the horror, and Rainbow puts on a horror show. In his New York apartment, with the help of a closetful of costumes and some desk-top high tech with which to record and edit, he concocts his brilliant parodies every few weeks and posts them online.

This one-man-band, business start-up has brought him not just an Emmy nomination, YouTube fame and fortune, but a cabaret show he takes on the road for a few dates every month. Fans can even buy Randy Rainbow merch at Amazon, including his signature pink, cat’s eye glasses and “Randy Rainbow: Fabulous for 2020” souvenir T-Shirts.

Is this a great country or what? It is so long as wits like Randy are free to amuse the doubters, dissenters, and me with his Rainbow dissections. With apologies to FDR:

Happy Days have gone away
So long as Trump is here to stay,
Yet we still can smile on any day
Randy Rainbow has his say.