I had a great anniversary dinner with my wife last night at Ruby Foo's, a hip, inviting, sprawling oriental restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side (it wasn't the anniversary of our wedding but of the day we met, fourteen years ago). Much as I enjoyed myself, it was a bit disconcerting to glance up from the tasty sushi rolls to find one of the 20th century's greatest killers staring back at me. Mao Zedong's five-foot-tall portrait rather prominently adorns one of the eatery's walls.
Oh, I realize Mao's visage has a certain iconic value (a kind of feeble echo of Alberto Korda's famed portrait of Che Guevara). I even understand that Ruby Foo's interior decorators must have been going for a measure of irony, and that no endorsement of the Great Henchman Helmsman was probably implied. Still, dining under a genocidal killer's watchful eye isn't particularly conducive to one's appetite. Go figure.
Further occasion to reflect on people's attraction to mass-murdering strongmen came today, when I happened upon this article in the Guardian. Turns out that Spain's Ministry of Public Works removed ex-dictator Francisco Franco's last remaining statue the other day (better late than never). This operation had to be done under cover of the night and under false pretenses, so as not to tip off the man's supporters. Regardless, hundreds of outraged fascists showed up on the square to join in general rabble-rousing and stiff-armed salutes. Presumably, they'd like to return to times like these:
"[Under Franco,] criticism is regarded as treason, political parties are outlawed, universal suffrage is eliminated, and the Catholic Church is restored as the official religion of Spain. The National Movement is made the country's only legal political organisation and the parliament is turned into the executive's puppet. Civil marriage is banned, divorce and abortion are made illegal, and religious education becomes compulsory in schools. Most reformist legislation introduced by the republicans is revoked. Strikes are banned, the media is muzzled ... Spain becomes a cultural wilderness as artists and intellectuals are either forced into exile or silenced by censorship. Trade unions are destroyed and their funds and property confiscated. Former supporters of the Popular Front are banned from entering public life. Franco introduces the 'Nuevo Estado' (New State), a system based on the fascist ideas of unquestioning loyalty, the denial of individual rights and freedoms, and state intervention in economic and social management."
Yeah, Spain sure was a regular paradise back then.
Despite their political differences, I think Mao and Franco might have hit it off. Both knew how to decisively deal with people who had the unfortunate tendency to reject tyranny, embrace freedom, and think for themselves.
Well, haven't we also gone a long way to reducing the Third Reich to comic/icon status with shows and movies like THE PRODUCERS ( not to mention HOGAN'S HEROES years before)and ritualistic, idiotic, content-free denunciations of the current administation as "fascist"?
The eternal problem of crying wolf: people get used to the wolves. They even become fashionable.
Posted by: Martin Owens | Tuesday, August 22, 2006 at 09:09 PM