Saving Danny Glover

...If Ch?vez is bankrolling the star of Chu Chu and the Philly Flash because he’s mentally ill, we can all relax...

...With Hitler, it was the homicidal response to the Reichstag fi re...

...With Robespierre, it was the decision to have himself declared a demigod...

...Ch?vez’s decision to pony up the cash for such a forlorn enterprise can mean only one of two things: He has fi nally gone completely off his rocker, or he is deliberately trying to screw with the American people...

...I personally was so devastated by the sight of an elderly man trudging out of the theater dejectedly after watching the fi lm that I not only refunded him the nine-dollar ticket price, but created an alter ego known as the Bad Movie Angel, who would patrol the streets of Gotham issuing refunds to anyone unlucky enough to have paid to see a fi lm starring Demi Moore, Ashley Judd, Shaquille O’Neal, Glover, or Pesci...

...If Ch?vez, who has always had a few screws loose, is funding Glover because he’s gone around the bend, then he will quickly be on to his next madcap adventure, and this will be the last we hear of his incipient career as a Caracasian Cecil B. DeMille...

...But if Ch?vez has put Danny Glover on the payroll because he thinks it’s funny, then maybe it’s time to nuke the son of a bitch...

...Glover is neither the fi rst nor the last has-been to get all palsy-walsy with a well-heeled scumbag, though this may be the fi rst time on record that anyone from Hollywood has toadied up to a Venezuelan scumbag...

...And since Glover once appeared in Operation Dumbo Drop, Ch?vez has to be aware that the artistic merits of his Heroes of Latin American Democracy series are unlikely to be high...

...There have been three sequels to Saw, the most recent of which is currently in theaters...

...Still is...

...But that poor fellow was the saddest human being I had ever laid eyes on...

...The hapless Glover also appeared in the 1997 Everglades caper Gone Fishin...

...Let me underscore that I had seen thousands of dejected old men trudge out of crummy movies before I spied that defeated, teary-eyed, broken-down old enough issues to infl ame this or that Joe Queenan is the author, most recently, of Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile’s Pilgrimage to the Mother Country...

...With Idi Amin, it was the directive to expel Asians—the linchpins of the economy— from Uganda...

...Like Castro and Noriega, he would adhere to the tried-and-true banana republic script: shutting down television stations, suppressing student protests, making enemies disappear, using the nation’s treasury to buy the proletariat’s support, redistributing farmland to urbanites with no expertise in the horticultural arts...

...As the old saw goes: You mess with us, we’re gonna mess with you...

...A man willing to bankroll the star of The Cookout today is a man who might be ready to bankroll The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag II tomorrow...

...Glover’s chumminess with South America’s most depraved dictator is neither surprising nor disturbing: He is a toad, and toads get toady...

...I, for one, hope that his actions are an indication of dementia rather than a crass attempt to insult Americans...

...Now, in a fearful development suggesting that Venezuelan strongman Hugo Ch?vez is rapidly transmogrifying from a generic South American thug into a fi end straight from the bowels of Hell, the Venezuelan government has announced plans to bankroll Danny Glover’s fl edgling career as a producer...

...Glover’s recent fi lms are widely available in South America, so it is almost impossible to believe that Ch?vez expects his productions to make any money...

...Experts agree that even the most violent dictators can usually be pacifi ed by bribes or diplomacy, and only become dangerous when they start to behave in an unpredictable fashion...

...Armed with the immense revenues gushing from Venezuela’s oil fi elds, Ch?vez fi nds himself in a position to breathe life into corpses as varied as Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Skeet Ulrich, Joe Piscopo, and yes, The Boz...

...Thanks, Danny...

...gent dragging himself from Gone Fishin’, and had never once been tempted to give any of them a refund...

...For the longest time, it appeared that Ch?vez would remain a respectable neo-Peronist goon, more a nuisance than a threat...

...This is the difference between a crook like Vladimir Putin and a lunatic like Kim Jong Il...

...If, on the other hand, Ch?vez is funding Glover because he is trying to make life miserable for the American people, the prospects are far more troubling...

...While appearing in several passable fi lms early in his career (The Color Purple, Witness, Grand Canyon), Glover is best known, if not actually respected, for his work as Mel Gibson’s sidekick in the Lethal Weapon series...

...this, too, shall pass...

...Glover was recently seen in the formulaic Dreamgirls, getting fourth billing in a fi lm that only had four stars...

...What is of particular concern is Ch?vez’s gratuitously cruel resuscitation of Glover’s career...

...This pretty well describes the arc of his career...

...Arguably the least comic comedy ever made, Gone Fishin’ stars Glover and Joe Pesci as barely animate, middle-aged knuckleheads who go on a fi shing expedition and get into a whole heap o’ trouble...

...Lowlights include the fi rst Saw movie, an evil, moronic slimefest in which manacled captives must sever their own limbs in order to escape death...

...But now, by agreeing to provide the has-been Danny Glover with $20 million to bankroll a fi lm about Simon Bolivar, and a second fi lm about Haitian legend Toussaint L’Ouverture, Ch?vez has begun to manifest a bizarre, Maoist streak that is genuinely terrifying...

...BY JOE QUEENAN Men of goodwill dread the moment when an autocrat morphs into a tyrant, when a powerhungry dictator descends into outright madness...

...A man who is willing to give a Danny Glover $20 million on Monday might be willing to give Steven Seagal $40 million on Tuesday...

...Rarely asked to carry the ball, he has often appeared in slop like Silverado, Good Fences, The Saint of Fort Washington...

...In it, he played a talent agent who gets outmaneuvered by a sharper talent agent...

...The charitable view is that Ch?vez is only bankrolling Glover because it is an ingenious way to insult Americans...