Thinking back over it, I more and more frequently begin to wonder why I bother to write at all. What difference does it make to the bigger picture?
There was that piece about the King of Afghanistan being wooed in hectic fashion by members of the American Congress. ”Come on back to your country,” they yelled into his increasingly incredulous, elderly face that had grown used to life on the Italian Riviera.
As far as I can tell, he refused. Who would want to go and live an uncertain life in Afghanistan, even if the American Congress guaranteed you a luxurious lifestyle for the rest of your uncertain passage through life? With the bombs now going off with increasing frequency, the impeccably credentialed Médécins sans Frontières definitively pulling out after suffering the loss of several selfless medical practitioners to kidnappers, looters and general mayhem, and the United States generally seeming to have lost interest, what price luxury in a palace cut off by deeply hectic mujahedeen? Sounds like asking for trouble.
Instead of the old king coming back into power, the occupying forces were content to install a chap called Hamid Karai Ghosht, or something else that sounds suspiciously like the kind of curry you would get in one of those Pakistani/ Bangladeshi joints off the Tottenham Court Road, Central London, on a Friday night. And he looks the part, too, dressed up like a Christmas tree in his Bond Street designer floor-length cloak and cocked Astrakhan hat, pushing out blandishments in his mid-Atlantic accent like there was no tomorrow.
No one else looks or sounds like him in Afghanistan anyway. But that counts for naught among the powers that be in Washington and London. After all, they are the New Lords of the Universe, and we better believe it. So Karai Ghosht for breakfast, lunch and supper it is.
No, no, no, if I were the former King of Afghanistan, I too would stay in exile and let them get on with it.
The other thing I said that no one paid a blind bit of attention to was the situation in Equatorial Guinea. Maybe my approach is too subtle. But just because I came down on the side of the forces which had prevented a stealthy military coup led for reasons of pure greed by members of the former special forces of South Africa, Britain and the United States, doesn’t mean that I was using this particular space in support of a wily dictator with an offshore Atlantic island full of oil at his disposal — offshore wealth which he, of course, has no intention of using for the upliftment of his people.
The sight, then, of our state president smilingly shaking hands on the lawn of some presidential guest house or other with the murderous Thadeus T Nguema, or whatever his name is, gave pause for thought. In fact, many commentators in many rival publications commented on it. Although, not actually having been in Equatorial Guinea personally, as has yours truly, they have something of a nerve to think they are in a position to give comment.
But anyway. The fact of the matter is that Equatorial Guinea is not a great advertisement for the high-falutin’ ideals of the African Union and its so-called ”peer review mechanisms”. Sure, we don’t want it to be recolonised. But keeping its bizarre boss at arms length would have been a good way to make the point that we are serious about standards of African leadership. Unless our own leadership is subtly telling us there is something we don’t know. I guess we will never know.
Then there is Haiti, another black country of great natural beauty and remarkable potential in human and other forms of natural wealth that still doesn’t stand a chance in the modern world — ”modern” being not what we could make it, but rather what others, who shall remain nameless (since they have already been mentioned above), tell us it is.
Haiti’s deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has been made to feel very much at home, at taxpayers’ expense, in Pretoria, South Africa, in spite of the enigmatic nature of his removal, and in spite of the equally enigmatic and uncertain nature of his contribution to the transformation of Haiti. A priest-turned-politician is always a dubious proposition. The two professions would seem to contradict each other.
Aristide, it is true, started out from the high moral ground. But all indications are that he soon gave this up in favour of the temptations of power, and that he lost the plot in the process. History, I guess, will be the judge.
We are left, finally, with the Hollywood rollout of the American presidential election that will decide the future of us all. One would have thought that George W Bush would be a gift for any ambitious politician with a real agenda. How could he and his fumbling, kak-handed, Laurel and Hardy lookalike, world-bashing team stand a chance against a serious contender with a passionate belief in the future of the world, which the Bush administration has done so much to undermine?
The Democrats have not been able to come up with anyone more challenging than John Kerry, a fellow who looks convincing until you listen to what he is actually saying (apart from having an unfortunately macabre, undertaker type of face, which would not make you rush out to vote, even if you had the choice.)
Unfortunately, Kerry has allowed the boss-eyed Bush to back-foot him on the central issue of the election: he has accepted, nay adopted, Bush’s ridiculous homily about being ”a wartime president” in a phony war that he himself invented.
Which leaves us somewhat uncertain about what we would be voting for anyway — even if we, the Wretched of the Earth, were allowed to have a say in the way our lives will be governed for the foreseeable future.
The former King of Afghanistan was right. It’s best just to duck out of the way and hope that the whole thing will blow over one of these days.
The trouble is, it probably won’t.