Andy Todd’s Jukebox Durie presents…The Dictators

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Former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu called himself the ‘Genius of The Carpathians’ and built a palace so huge that today’s Romanian Parliament can only use 30% of it. Also he demanded every scientist in Romania include his wife’s name on their research papers, which was strange, as she was illiterate and couldn’t read it. You might as well claim Stevie Wonder is the father of photography.

This wasn’t the most unusual move by a dictator. Idi Amin gave himself the titles “Conqueror of the British Empire” and “President for Life”, which were close to the mark. Britain was only third in the medal table at the London olympics while Mr President For Life died in 2003 after he was overthrown and exiled. Whoops! I bet he now knows why crowds weren’t just chanting ‘Idi Out’ but ‘Idiot’.

Idi is not the dumbest dictator. Not by a long mile. Francisco Macias Nguema was President of Equatorial Guinea. He killed the head of the national bank and then hid all the money of the National Treasury in
his house when clearly it would have been easier to move his bed and settee to the Treasury. He didn’t last long though. Francisco died in 1979 when he was shot like a dog, a dalmatian to be exact, as he was
shot one hundred and one times. Which just goes to show, when trying to free a country from tyranny, sometimes you must be Cruella to be kind.

One of my favourite dictators is Saparmurat Niyazov, the former ruler of Turkmenistan. Niyazov is famous for declaring 10th July a public holiday in honour of melons – one of the country’s main exports – and
27 April, Horse Day. He renamed January after himself, and April after his mother, while he banned beards because of his suspicion of Islamic fundamentalists and ballet because he deemed it unnecessary.

That’s not all – he changed the word for bread to the name of his mother. He named several schools, two airports, a city, some theatres, a brand of vodka, two kinds of cologne, a kind of tea, and a meteorite
after himself. He even created a new Turkmen alphabet, basing it on the Latin one instead of the Cyrillic so not only was everything given a new name it given a new way to spell it too.

Oh, and he built a 50-foot statue of his book in the middle of the capital of Turkmenistan just because he could. And every night at 8pm it opened and a video recording played a passage of the book. [Editor’s Note: The statue was also gold-plated and rotated to always be facing the sun… Live the dream.]

History does not record the size of Niyazov’s penis, but one assumes it was not 50-foot high.

No round-up of dictators would be complete without mentioning Kim Jong Il, the former leader of North Korea. There’s a lot you can say about Kim but my favourite fact is this – whenever Kim’s name was published in North Korea it had to be published in bold. Also Kim’s name had to be followed by at least one of his over 50 titles.Dear Leader. Great Leader. Guiding Star of the 21st Century. Supreme Leader of the Nation. Sun of Socialism. And the ever so creepy ‘Father of the Neighbour’s Children’.

History does record the size of Kim Jong Il’s penis.

Kim himself revealed that not only had he shot five holes in one in one game of golf, in the same interview he confirmed that his dick was two foot long and one foot wide, and all the ladies in North Korea called him King Dong Il. Playa!

If Jukebox Durie was a dictator however, I would just have one title, just to keep things simple. Everyone would need to me as a ‘Primary School Teacher’ because everyone loves a primary school teacher. And if they don’t I’ll round them up and shoot them.

But why, you may ask, are you talking about dictators? That’s a good question. I don’t know what brought to mind some of the world’s biggest authoritarian figures, men who don’t accept “no” for an answer. No
reason at all, I suppose. Now here’s a song about Alex Ferguson.

All These Things That’s He Won:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM3N9xyWktI

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About the Author
After too many years as season ticket holder at Parkhead, Andy Todd renounced the SPL three years ago to support Queens Park. One team is a rank bunch of amateurs who play in a state of the art stadium and the other is…(I think we can all see where this is going).

Andy has been performing comedy for 18 months but is currently ‘between gigs’ while he writes a book on Scottish property law to be published in Summer 2012. Its potential audience will be less than 300 but his mum will be very proud.

Follow Andy on Twitter: @toddandy

Check out Andy’s website: www.toddandy.com

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