Welcome home, Roman Polanski.
We’re glad to have you back. We know it’s been a tough thirty years or so, what with the travel restrictions and this thing hanging over you here in California, U.S.A. Hey, look, if she’d been a couple of years older you’d be in the Senate by now, instead of being flown-in courtesy of the government, but it’s better late than never.
We show your movies all the time on American television. Chinatown, of course, and those Oscars. By the way, do you still have the statuettes? The Academy asked me to ask you.
If you’d been in Tennessee and she’d been your cousin, you could’ve married her and everything would’ve been cool; just ask Jerry Lee Lewis.
We don’t want you to think we’ve ignored you. I know it probably seemed that way pretty often, since the U.S. government didn’t make much fuss over you through six administrations, if you count Ford, but we’ve gotten a progressive into the White House, change we can believe in, and one of the changes is that we take care of old business.
Actually, you might feel honored that you’ve been invited back. After all, we’re now “turning the page” on every criminal enterprise from illegal wiretapping to torture, but we think enough of you to make an exception. No more turning the page so far as you’re concerned.
A cynic could believe that this is simply a great way to sell ugly cars and cowpiss beer to the viewers on F*X, that sex plays, as they say, especially the kind that Republican members of Congress fantasize about when they’re ostensibly reading the bailout legislation.
But don’t you believe it. We’re bringing you home because we’re a nation of grace and forgiveness, a beacon of justice and the rule of law in the world.
