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From Socialist Worker, 9 November 1985.
Reprinted in In the Heat of the Struggle, London 1993, p.226.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
ALTHOUGH ALL the obituaries said what a warm and wonderful person he was, it is likely that Phil Silvers died a bitter man.
When he lay down to sleep and didn’t wake up again last weekend he was 73 years of age and much better known as Bilko than by his real name. The first episode of Bilko was made in 1956, the last in 1959. When the show was cancelled he was 47.
He managed a few stage shows afterwards and guest spots in films, but for the most part he was offered only appearances on TV chat shows and cabarets in which he was required to be Bilko.
In private and sometimes in public he raged that although Bilko remained massively popular and the networks ran and re-ran the programmes (as they still do) no I one would ever put up the money for another series.
What he didn’t understand was that Bilko was the product of a fleeting moment in post-war American history.
The character was created after the end of the war in Korea and killed off just before Castro and Kennedy and the first ominous incursions into Vietnam.
At home and abroad the Bilko era was as peaceful and tame as America has known in half a century. Actually Bilko pudgy, bald and full of innocent bluster – was as unviolent and unmilitary a character as has ever been created in the United States. Not once during the series did Master Sergeant Ernie or any of his motor pool squad fire a shot in anger.
Bilko’s appeal lay in his endless battle of wits against stuffed shirt authority and his irrepressible pursuit of easy money via crooked gambling schemes.
In the course of this he bombarded the top brass with ridicule. The series’ standard plot was of Bilko managing by some inspired contrivance to escape the consequences of sustained insubordination.
Many episodes ended with a bemused Colonel Potter making yet another futile effort to understand how Ernie had triumphed again. And of course the audience was clearly invited to identify with the brash role and to enjoy the discomfiture of thwarted authority.
Such a pitch wouldn’t have been possible a few years earlier when military matters were serious in the States and Pentagon chiefs were lobbying for a nuclear strike at North Korea and a land invasion of Mao’s China.
Nor would it have been permissible a few years later when the Bay of Pigs was followed by the deepening involvement in Indo-China and patriotic paranoia became the dominant mood in middle America.
From 1956 to 1959 it was possible – just about – to believe that Fort Baxter was a slapstick representation of a piece of existing reality. But from the onset of the sixties it has to be seen – and could be mightily enjoyed – as a satire on something which clearly no longer existed. No new series would have been plausible even as pantomime.
Ernie Bilko was a casualty of US foreign aggression.
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Last updated: 11 March 2010