There was this really excellent Ollie Stone doco on last week, Commandante, about Fidel and Cuba. Allowing for wind-sheer both ways (Ollie seemed overly interested in the Who Magazine style questions, plus he’s from Hollywood) and (the Cuban authorities probably put a little effort into seeing that the one or two whingers didn’t show up at every outing) and I thought it gave a pretty good impression of Castro and the Cuban Communist party. [There’s a whinger or two everywhere – I bet – even in Heaven, complaining about how fluffy the clouds aren’t comfortable and God is quietly regretting letting them in.]
My personal opinion and experiences of being honest and being a liar, while watching Fidel, reminded me that it’s so much easier to talk when you can be honest about stuff and know it won’t blow up on you. He’s a brilliant public speaker, even if I don’t speak Spanish. On the other hand, perhaps it is not that Bush jr. has an IQ of 48 that hinders him, it’s that it becomes extremely complex to complete a single sentence when there’s hundreds of factors to take into account “can’t mention this because it’ll effect that, can’t mention such n’ such because they don’t know the truth about the other thing” etc. I know what it’s like because I used to lie a lot. So in the case of Bush’s brain it’s like asking a 486 computer (a really slow one) to predict the ocean currents (really difficult) — it just bogs down. Viva Fidel.
That reminds me, I’ve really got to arrange to get out bowling this week.But the politicians here are just as much of two-bit hoods as america or UK and probably other bourgeois-democratic, non-english speaking countries too. The circus is in town and the BigTop’s errected. The challenger this time has a clever spin/speech writer who can boil policy down to tabloid headline size, such as “Cheap Drugs for Sick Ausies”, “Ease the Squeeze”. The incumbent treasurer felt he had to respond to the latter in kind; “He’s trying to Hoax the Folks”.
I’d like to see the rest of the campaign performed exclusively in a mixture of rhyming couplets, rap and snappily choreographed, large-scaled dance numbers.