In a bloody epic. I was one of the
Bombed and fleeing humanity.
In the distance the great leader
Crowed like a rooster from a balcony,
Or was it a great actor
Impersonating the great leader?”—Pulitzer Prize-winning Serbian-American poet Charles Simic (1938-2023), “Cameo Appearance,” in The Voice at 3 a.m.: Selected Late and New Poems (2003)
As a child in World War II, Charles Simic was forced to evacuate with his family several times from their Belgrade home, part of the “bombed and fleeing humanity” of that conflict—or, as he put it elsewhere, “My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin.” He finally made it to America as a teenager.
This past week witnessed the fall of another strongman: Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, whose father, Hafez al-Assad, began the family tradition of bloody rule in 1971. That’s a long time for a country to endure such repression and violence, and now the evidence of this misrule is becoming starkly evident: mass graves uncovered, perhaps numbering hundreds of thousands of people tortured to death.
And there is another way in which the Syrians' plight resembles the Simic family's: over 14 million forcibly displaced since the nation's civil war began in 2011.
The fate of Assad should be kept in mind by entertainers with authoritarian aspirations: it may take a while, but a reckoning will be at hand, for yourself and/or your family.
(The image accompanying this post, showing Assad with Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss military operations in Syria, was taken Oct. 21, 2015—nine years before the Russian dictator, with blood on his own hands too thick for words, decided that the costs of helping the younger man remain in power was more than he could handle now.)
