Alexandre Trudeau ejaculates

(Alexandre Trudeau looking pensive, likely reflecting on Mr. Castro's barrel chest)

To my great regret I just finished reading the recently published hagiographic cartoon of dictator Fidel Castro, penned by Alexandre Trudeau in the Toronto Star. I can't quite figure out if the son of the former Prime Minister is expressing subconscious homo-erotic thoughts about the cigar smoking, communist octogenarian, or if it is that Trudeau is as thick as a brick. I do not rule out both. What is beyond dispute however is that he is beyond a doubt his mother's son.

Consider this piercing piece of prose.

Indeed, like my father, in private, Fidel is not a politician. He is more in the vein of a great adventurer or a great scientific mind. Fidel doesn't really do politics. He is a revolutionary.

He lives to learn and to put his knowledge in the service of the revolution. For Fidel, revolution is really a work of reason. In his view, revolution, when rigorously adopted, cannot fail to lead humanity towards ever greater justice, towards an ever more perfect social order.

Or not. If the 20th century demonstrated anything, it showed us that rigorously adopted revolutionary ideology leads to the ruin of nations and the suffering and death of countless of millions of people. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were nothing if not rigorous. They were rigorous in suppressing basic human rights, rigorous in killing all who stood in their way and many who didn't, rigorous in ignoring the great virtues and rigorous in championing the great vices. Fidel Castro is a soul mate of them all.

Note how Trudeau gushes like a dewy cheeked schoolgirl over Fidel's manliness and intellect.

His intellect is one of the most broad and complete that can be found. He is an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets. On everything.

Combined with a Herculean physique and extraordinary personal courage, this monumental intellect makes Fidel the giant that he is. He is something of a superman.

Expert on everything? The word twaddle does not begin to describe this adolescent nonsense. If Castro knows something about internal combustion engines it is the 1955 Chevrolet, that iconic Cuban mode of transportation that is his great legacy to the Cuban people. I understand that Cuban auto mechanics try to emulate their great leader in this respect. But virtue of necessity is no virtue. (As wrote Aristotle, as I recall.)

Trudeau, of course, does not blame Castro, or the unworkable Marxist economic model for the catastrophic failure of the Cuban economy and the concomitant misery of it's people. He reveals the real cause.

Cuba under Castro is a remarkably literate and healthy country, but it is undeniably poor. Historians will note, however, that never in modern times has a small, peaceful country been more subjected to unfair and malicious treatment by a superpower than Cuba has by the United States.

Oh really now? How about Finland crushed by the communist USSR, Holland and Denmark by the rigorously ideological Nazi Germany, Tibet by communist China, or the Phillipines by Imperial Japan. One can go on and on, but the point is made. Alexandre may have a degree in philosophy, but he should have done at least a minor in history. He would be saved from great personal embarrassment.

Now it is true that the United States has refused to permit Fidel Castro to play the great Marxist internal combustion engine expert, while reaping the substantial economic benefits of selling his cigars in the world's greatest free market economy. That is surely America's right.

Access to the rather advanced economies of Canada and Europe, however, and the infusion of massive subsidies from the USSR (another failed economic and political experiment), did not seem to compensate much though. All those educated healthy Cubans can not overcome domestic political oppression and a thoroughly discredited and unworkable economic theory, no matter how rigorously applied or how charismatic the deep diving revolutionary leadership. The Cuban communist dictatorship is rotten to the core, just as other Marxist inspired dictatorships are, and were, rotten to the core.

Towards the end Trudeau's silly article, already plumbing a newly discovered definition of the word dreadful, finally death spirals into irredeemable pretentiousness.

With the possible exception of Nelson Mandela, already well into retirement, Fidel is the last of the global patriarchs. Reason, revolution and virtue are becoming more and more distant and abstract concepts. We will perhaps never see another patriarch. We thus have to conceive of the departure of the last patriarch in psychoanalytical terms. The death of the father doesn't signal our liberation from him -- quite the contrary. The death of a father so grand and present as Castro will, rather, immortalize him in the minds of his children.

Mr. Trudeau will no doubt make a celebrated film about Castro that will be watched reverently by platitudinous political dilletantes everywhere.

And I expect Fidel Castro, once he makes his final deep dive, will be immortalized wherever the romantically puerile gather to gush ahistorically about Marxist revolutionary theory in a rigorously intellectual void that is pig ignorant about the real meaning of virtue and romantically irrational about the place and character of right reason in the firmament.

T'was ever thus.