Dialogue: Speight's antics show absurdity behind evil

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

George Speight looks like Mussolini: short, bald, stupid and pathologically vain. And he has ended up as Mussolini did, adrift on a sea of events he does not understand, cannot control and in which he and his country may sink into tragedy.

The fact is he's a nasty racist of the worst sort - those who clothe their vice in the virtue of spiritual superiority.

The attitude of many indigenous Fijians reminds me of a visit to Sumatra, Indonesia. A Government driver, a pleasant young Malay who had been educated in the United States, carried me around for a few days. He lived in Medan and when we were in the city I spent a convivial evening with his mother and father and some of his siblings. As we became friends and he confided in me more and more, I realised how he ascribed what problems he did have in the world to the existence in Indonesia of ethnic Chinese.

He explained to me how his brother had come to commercial grief after setting up a thriving business wholesaling various types of supplies to hospitals. Then along came a Chinese person who set up in opposition, found a cheaper source of supplies and virtually put him out of business. "That's the sort of thing they do," he said nodding his head, looking at me for affirmation. I smiled and said, "That's the sort of thing everybody does everywhere to keep us all honest."

He was perplexed at first, then quietly angry, and he asked me if I liked the Chinese. "The question is not worthy of an answer," I said and we travelled in silence for the remaining two days.

Nevertheless, the situation in Fiji has been richly comic. It reminds me of Duck Soup, a film the Marx Brothers made in the 1920s, and Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator. Both these great film-makers underlined the inherent absurdity behind the menacing evil of men who want to be kings.

It is sad that the Fijian economy is falling apart and the stress on the hostages is inhumane but I cock my ear for canned laughter as I watch Baldy George praying as a sham Christian, and when the news tells me he's swanning around Suva to meetings with Army leaders, arguing about a caretaker government, pontificating about the need for law and order and berating the Army for "riding roughshod over the wishes of the Fijian people."

Imagine a treatment for a proposed musical comedy. This Mussolini lookalike - the Mickey Mouse of the terrorism set, not so much the Jackal as the Weasel - is having money trouble. He decides the cause is not his own incompetence but the fact that another ethnic group is smarter than his own people and therefore must be indulging in sharp practices. So he hijacks the Government of the country and tries to give him and his mates what is now so glibly called a competitive advantage by suppressing the other group.

The scene opens with Baldy George in a limo just after martial law has been proclaimed. He's waving to the soldiers at the roadblocks as he makes his way to meet gritty young Lieutenant-Colonel Tintinnabulous at a conference hall to negotiate a new government.

"Tinny," as he's known, is a fierce-looking guy dressed in battle fatigues. Like all the soldiers in Sugar Island, he's had training in coup management because, instead of having votes on constitutional reform, the Sugarites hold coups.

Baldy George enters left, points his finger at an ethnic Indian chorus, rubs his thumb over the point of Tinny's bayonet, and sings:

Sh-a-a-a-rp practices are what they're at,
Sh-a-a-a-rp practices, well tit-for-tat,
Sha-a-a-rp practices, my point is made
Not with my brains but with a bay-o-net blade.

Then a chorus of indigenous Fijians sings:

It's hell to strain your kava Through a woollen balaclava,
But it's worth it to make minions
Of two hundred thousand Inions

Huddled on the right of the stage is a small group of ethnic Indians singing "The Cane Farmers' Blues":

While they're smiling "Bula"
We stay home and count the moolah,
And while we're cutting sugar canes
We exercise our fertile brains.
Old Baldy's just a silly bugger
From many hits while playing rugger.

The main romantic interest is Baldy George with himself. He sings a poignant rendition of Amazing Face to the mirror, followed by a soliloquy, centre-stage, in which he says he is all the ethnic Fijian people.

"I am the multitude, I am everyone. The Christian God was only three but I am the multitude with pulchritude, and I represent the righteous, the holy ..."

In the last scene he dances with himself, alone and wondering why the world is so perverse that it cannot see the simplicity of his virtue; then he falls off the stage into the orchestra pit of history.