What 12 Years a Slave gets wrong – and The Book Thief gets right

Damn, damn, damn! It has to be me, and all these years I’ve been thinking it was Hollywood. By the time you read this it will all be over, like the Olympics, but I had someone play 12 Years A Slave on my television set — it’s called Apple TV but I’m incapable of making it work on my own — and could only watch for ten minutes. Then I had the nice woman who assists me change the film. To me it was like watching a cartoon, as one scene jumped to another without continuity, just clips of horrible whites torturing an innocent black man. Needless to say, it won best picture in El Lay, and of course it would, wouldn’t it? Slavery makes Hollywood go weak at its knees as it’s a moneymaker like no other. Brutal white American Southerners plus black victims of American greed equals lotsa moolah at the box office.

Now don’t for a minute think I’m defending slavery. We Greeks haven’t had slaves in modern times, just 2,500 years ago. We stopped after Jesus Christ told us we were all equal in the eyes of God. The fact that Arabs and Africans did not stop, however, is something Hollywood sharks have chosen to ignore. Anyway, had I lived in the American South back then, I would have freed my slaves had I inherited any. Free men work better, as do well-paid domestic servants. I don’t mistreat or fire people, except the odd Frog captain of my boat, who was so busy impregnating women he was always below deck while I spent my time unsuccessfully screaming for him to surface. (He then got a job with an English gent, who asked me for a reference, got a good one, and when I eventually met the Englishman he told me that the captain I gave a great reference to had tried to murder him and was at that moment residing in a St Tropez jail.)