Run Off

As I have famously stated, nobody cares about Africa. For this frankness the mainstream media have roundly condemned me, but I continue to stand by my statement. Just yesterday an editorial in the New York Times went on and on in a screeching tirade about how I was a "steroidal middle brow" whose "sophomoric grasp of SAT vocabulary words" disguised a "desperately second-rate pseudo-intellect". My. Such rancor I stir up, to cause some endomorphic liberati apparatchik to hoist himself off his home/office colonic irrigation system and squirt the sheets of the Gray Lady with this highest product of his ratiocinations. Likewise, the Washington Post has called me "the Oberführer of religio-onanists." One should have hoped that their insults would at least have the merit of being personal. Instead, they just trip down that list of funny slash mean words they've been keeping, and splice them together like refrigerator magnets. Shoddy.

None if their verbiage seems to find a target worth slathering with their froth. Haven't they even heard of Mugabe? That's what I mean, you know, when I say Africa doesn't matter. Instead of risking the ire of their epicine cohorts, by slighting a fading marxist, they target me with their flung fruit pies and feces. The world turned upside down. That way, Africa will be on the bottom. Out of sight, out of mind.

There Mugabe was earlier this month, at an international UN food conference on feeding the hungry. That's Mugabe, mind you. M-u-g-a-b-e. The dicpotato of Zimbabwe? Former bread basket of Africa? Now primary basket case of the world? You know, where inflation averaged 7600 percent last year? And will be 200,000%? -- or two million percent? Cuz that's a really good way to, uh, make people prosperous -- printing up monies with more and more zeros on them. They won't run out of room -- just make the zeros smaller, and the bills bigger. Soon you'll be able to patch your roof with all that paper, if you have a roof.

Three million have fled the country in the past handful of years. Unemployment at over 80% ... estimated, of course ... their Bureau of Statistics might be just a teensy bit undermanned. Tourism down from one and a half million ten year ago, to, uh, zero, now. That Mugabe just loves zeros. It's his favorite number. Like, 400,000 lost agricultural jobs. There must be a way to get some more zeros into that, right? More babies, maybe, who could be given agricultural jobs to lose. Hey, I'm just brainstorming here -- not all my ideas can be great. But we gotta do something, right, for Mugabe? Cuz if he can ever be happy, maybe he'll finally be satisfied. Him and his cronies, who took over the farms and made them, well, not actually farms anymore ... uh, wilderness parks?

In a week there will be the runoff election, which Tsvangirai already actually won. But Mugabe has said he will ignore the results. The triumph of the will, after all, is an undeniable fact, to marxists and nazis and other free thinkers. Free from reality. You won't hear anything on the news about this non-election. Tsvangirai, already much harassed by Mugabe's police, will be dead by then, most likely. Don't worry yourself about it. Just another dead African. If history and the New York Times have taught us anything, it's that Africans don't matter. You might not be following the logic there. Its strands are ganglionic.

So here I am, naked of course, dividing my attention between this keyboard and one of the full-length mirrors that line my satin-draped boudoir -- I find grapeseed oil is best for bringing out the sheen on my rippled physique -- and I had to ask myself a question. What's in it for Mugabe, when he ruins his country? Is he devoted to some ideology, some marxist conceit about theory being more important than humanity? Clearly not. Almost anything is more important than humanity, but that's not it. He will long ago have outgrown even cynicism, to be contained by something as limiting as marxism.

Is it the power? -- the simple ability to ruin lives, to have an effect, to be there, be in people's lives in an undeniable, unavoidable and relentless way? Yes, sadistic ego must be a large part of it. And the rest, I suppose, is the pleasure of contrasts. His daily savorings, of food and sex and the toilet -- he is after all over 80 years old, so his sex will be pretty passive and his bowel movements will be the most visceral of his pleasures -- his pleasures, I say, will be all the more intense, when taken in the presence of such despair. He will not have thought it through to this degree. He just understands that people are garbage, and those whom he favors, like dogs, he does so because even the spiritually dead might find some pleasure in dogs.

There's no remedy. When we go in and cut down monsters, as we did in Iraq, well, what's the result? More evil. Some good too, perhaps, but it's all so abstract, this balancing of theological concepts. Best, and easiest, only to think about how we can get more oil. An occasional international conference on food, but nothing that might bring fallow farmland back into production. No blood for food.

No remedy, as I say. Just editorials about me, and ignored elections, and all the while we grow more certain of our conviction, that Africa, like everything else, doesn't matter.


J