Truly horrible

Blogs from Zimbabwe are mostly too depressing to read, but since they all tell the same tale with endless variations, you don’t have to read many entries. They describe a society undergoing complete collapse, where the average citizen’s day starts with hours in a bank queue to withdraw a measly 100 million Zimbabwean dollars, the legal maximum, which might buy them a bus ride or an ear of corn, depending on whether the busses are running or anyone has an ear of corn to sell. Or if the price hasn’t doubled since this morning.

Then there’s mass starvation. Children gathering termites in a bag to take home for an evening meal. Elderly women following trucks to snatch loose kernels of corn falling onto the road.

And forget falling ill even if it is life-threatening, cholera-induced diarrhea, which is now rampant since the water authority ran out of purifying chemicals—maybe while Mugabe and his retinue were staying at a five-star Rome hotel during the World Food Summit [sic] in June. The hospitals have no IV lines, no sutures, no syringes and of course no staff since a nurse’s monthly wages now amount to about one U.S. dime.

Dictators have flourished since the dawn of time, but Mugabe represents the apogee of a peculiar variant, the leader of an armed rebellion against an unfair system who really thought all along that the war was about making him king. In the midst of the staggeringly complete breakdown of his realm, according to one blogger the guy still has lackeys painting the lines on the pavement leading to his kitsch Harare mansion.

You have to wonder how this sort of collective dementia at the top works. Party members share in the loot, and the soldiers are protected by connections and privileges. But when 80% of the country is unemployed and boiling old shoes for supper, doesn’t the message filter back somehow that things are falling apart?

And how long can you go on blaming the burgeoning chaos on old colonial masters deposed in the 1970s or a racist conspiracy led by Condi Rice? After all, the starving Zimbabweans who hate you are not white Europeans.

There is an element of testosterone poisoning involved as well. The Mugabe ads during the last electoral campaign made much of his opponents as ‘losers’ as if only having a monopoly of coercive methods meant anything in life, being the Big Guy and running the most convincing thugs. Okay, I get it, sort of like Marlow Stansfield’s operation in the last season of ‘The Wire’.

Some of the blogs are complaining bitterly about the opposition’s negotiations with Mugabe and the prospect of impunity for the criminals, but I suspect they needn’t worry on that score. The old guy apparently is too far gone to realize that cutting a quick deal was the best way to save his pathetic skin and avoid the kinds of spontaneous people’s justice that may be brewing for him and his retainers. They ought to be nervous.