A story that is Assad but true
Declan Lynch A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad (BBC2)
IT was the great Eamon Carr of Horslips who told me about this trick that Colonel Tom Parker had in his repertoire, in the years before he discovered Elvis. He would be selling hot dogs, except there would be very little “dog” in them, as such, just a small bit of sausage sticking out at either end of the bun. And when the unhappy customer would return to complain, the Colonel would say something like: “Hey buddy, you dropped the dog!”
It mightn’t have been very convincing, but life being so short, the old conman knew that the objective truth of the matter was nowhere near as important as the fact that he now had the customer’s money in his pocket.
I heard this story again in recent weeks in a BBC series which was not about the Colonel, or even about Trump, but about the late Hafez Assad, the Syrian dictator — with the small variation that it was a hamburger rather than a hot dog that Assad was selling. And of course it was a metaphorical hamburger rather than the actual hot dog in Eamon Carr’s story.
But it was the same story in the end,
how this mean hustler would receive visits from western leaders who were convinced that Assad had agreed something with them, only to discover that they’d been gulled — whatever they thought they were getting, they would realise that there was nothing in it.
A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad, which concludes next Tuesday on BBC2, is brilliant in several ways, but especially in its dismantling of the mystique which all such dynasties seek to create around themselves.
Last week the second episode started in 2004 with the present leader Bashar Assad, son of the hamburger hustler, and Bashar’s “first lady” Asma, who was raised in London of Syrian parentage, attending the opening of an opera house in Damascus. “Together they dream of reforming Syria, making it a respectable country on the world stage…”, the narrator says, with scenes from that lavish opening night along with the voice of Maria Callas singing something unbearably tragic. “Fourteen years later their country will be in ruins, over 10 million will have fled their homes, and half-amillion people will have been killed…”
The Assad family can appear like a perfect collection of TV drama characters — they include the old man and his wife, both of them monsters; the son who was a “real man” and who was meant to take over the family firm, but was killed in a car crash; the really crazy son who scares even the other scary family members; the daughter who is regarded by the father as probably the best of them but who can’t become leader because she’s a woman; and Bashar, regarded as a weak sort, with his training as an eye doctor in London, and his liking of the music of Phil Collins.
Naturally it is he who is somewhat reluctantly thrust into the big job, and on whose watch the country will be totally destroyed — if he had only been a TV drama character, they would probably have changed that bit.
But the most compelling of all these players, is the “first lady” Asma, radiating grace and charm and all those other luminous qualities she believes she must be radiating, to give the impression that with her beautiful English manners she and the good doctor Bashar are indeed turning Syria into that “respectable country” they imagined at the opera house — and yet as one commentator put it, there is “that other strange part of her personality”, her love of power. Which makes her “a modern first lady for an old-fashioned dictatorship”.
Ah yes, “that other strange part of her personality”. You could see it in her determination to go to the funeral of Pope John Paul II, to position herself and Bashar among the other world leaders, actually standing behind President McAleese but on the lookout for something a bit more in the superpower range.
“Contains upsetting scenes,” they warned us at the start. And they were not wrong about that either.