Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

Roger Ailes, who runs Fox News, helped Nixon to the Presidency in 1968 by inventing the ‘character issue’ to defeat the ghost of John F. Kennedy and, a year later, Teddy Kennedy. Another ghost, a living one, Fidel Castro, has lately written a book about his early years, and is making new friends, the way he does, in his eighty-fifth year. This is giving Ailes, and Fox News, trouble. Castro is different. How do we deal with Castro?What is Castro’s ‘character issue’? Does he have one?

Ales knows he can’t deny him his big achievements: the 98 percent literacy that was once 16, the great and famous free health service, the best doctors in the world, the free universities, the free food for everyone, the honeymoon bonus night out, the freedom of religion, the superb musical culture, the fine films, the working multiculture, and Fidel’s own astonishing survival, ninety miles from the most powerful enemy in the history of the world, of the forty-eight-year-old banana blockade and the twenty-seven assassination attempts and the six hundred assassination plans; nor the unfeigned adoration which eighty percent of his people, the people that stayed, still show for his rundown, ramshackle, generous, unauthoritarian non-democracy still inspiring all of South America and most of the counterculture of the West.

We can’t even say he’s particularly brutal when he executes in a decade fewer dissidents than Rick Perry does Blacks in a fortnight in Texas; and any ‘freedom fighter’ who wants to live in Florida he usually lets go there, by rubber-ducky, or pedalo, or kayak, or whatever, to join his gangster relatives and plot, once more, his murder.

So what are we to do?

Because Fidel if you look at him shapes up like a combination of Robin Hood, Judas Maccabeus, T.E. Lawrence, Davy Crockett, Indiana Jones and Clement Attlee. He has no money in a Swiss bank account, and he writes really well, and all his old mistresses still adore him, and the Mafia want him dead, and … what, so challenged by truth and legend, is Roger Ailes, and Fox News, to do?

Well, he does what he always does. He finds the telling detail and calls it a fatal flaw; as he did when he declared Obama to be a lofty academic, a grubby machine politician, friend of terrorists, a predatory homosexual and a fanatical insurgent Muslim with a false passport and a forged memoir, Dreams From My Father, Bill Ayres, the terrorist he ‘pals around’ with, wrote for him, things people didn’t know about him before, which they found out on Fox News.

And, well … Fidel talks too much, it seems; some of his speeches are six hours long. And this is unforgiveable. Though two million people, probably, survived infancy and got to adulthood and university and marriage and happy grandparenthood because of his human decency, this is unforgiveable. He talks too much. And though he’s by any count the most successful politician in a thousand years he talks too much, and he’s proved by this he’s nothing more, he’s nothing more, than … a prattling buffoon.

A six-hour speech? That’s as bad as a ten-hour innings by Tendulkar. Insufferable. Insupportable. How dare he?  How dare he live?

And thus it is that Fox News and Newscorp and SkyNews and Bolt and O’Reilly and Akerman and Hannity and Salusinsky reduce the politicians around them. They find an ordinary human characteristic, and pretend it matters. Evince shock at it. Amazement. Outrage. Roared up an air hostess did he? To the gallows with him. Off with his head.

Thus Adaminejad and Chavez and Strauss-Kahn and Latham are all buffoons. Not men whose talents put them at the top of their profession. Not men with an idea or two, like Allende or the Castros. Buffoons.

An extension of this is what was done to Castro. Hit-men were sent out by the CIA and the Mafia to kill him, and twenty-six attempts were unsuccessful. So Ailes and his people began to treat these attempted murders as if they were practical jokes. The exploding cigars. The poisoned wetsuit. The old mistress with a pellet of poison in her face cream jar she was supposed to inject him with, postcoitally while he snored, and she couldn’t go through with it. Hilarious. What a joke. What a joke on Fidel that would have been.

And thus, dirty trick by dirty trick, the Murdochists erode and steal way our humanity. Buffoons. All buffoons. What a joke if they died.

It’s a way of treating Communists and Muslims and brown-skinned people fleeing tyranny or seeking a better life in the way that white Americans once treated slaves. Subhumans. The Other. The lesser breeds without the Law. The heathen beasts of burden we keep chained up over night and rape if they are pretty. Dehumanised. Expendable. Or, like David Hicks, unreadable. That’s it, he’s unreadable, he’s not worth considering as a human being. He writes in fact as well as Koestler, but you mustn’t read him. Just keep saying he’s unreadable, barely literate, a daft prat, a trained killer, a buffoon. A violent, daft buffoon. Like Castro.

Yet the dehumanised, expendable Fidel is still with us, and saying his say in a book well worth reading, it seems, and Ailes can’t stand it.

Discuss.