Of course the word going around when the death of former president PW Botha was announced was: ‘How could they tell anyway?” The invincible old crocodile had been lounging around at his place in the Wilderness virtually unseen by human eyes, except for his youngish new wife, who popped up from time to time to say that he was not only fit and well but had healthy sexual appetites to boot. She was around to prove it.
All the more shame that the stuffy, proto-Stalinist SABC saw fit not to broadcast what was to be the last interview with the disreputable old reptile a few months ago. Chief executive Dali Mpofu came out saying that they were not going to wave flags for the last old fascist of the apartheid days, not even in the public interest. And yet, lo and behold, both the current State President, Thabo Mbeki, and his self-declared archrival Jacob ‘Jace the Ace” Zuma came out with what amounted to little less than eulogies on the passing of the finger pointing, jowly, deceased juggernaut, and flags were flown at half mast around the country. As the British satirical weekly used to say: ‘Pass the sick bag, Alice.”
It was a time of sea change around the world, as it happened. Botha’s age-mate and fellow fascist Augusto Pinochet was confined to house arrest (not that he’d left the house in ages anyway) as new charges finally appeared to be found to stick for his inhumane rule over the Latin American state of Chile following his vicious overthrow of the elected lefty leader Salvador Allende. Pinochet, like Botha, will probably pass on in his comfortable wilderness before having to be actually dragged through the courts. A 90-year-old doesn’t need it anyway and, apart from being unrepentant like the ‘total onslaught” PW, probably wouldn’t have much idea of what he was being accused of anyway.
While the old fascists crumble to nothing, the young fascists are getting a punching on the nose elsewhere in the world. Britain’s Tony ‘Blah-Blah” Blair, with nothing much to lose as he nears the end of his term of office, has suddenly come out of the twilight zone as a born again environmentalist. Pity there won’t be much environment left to save as he rides off into the sunset. Shame he didn’t spend a substantial part of his time at the helm of British politics doing something about it. Instead, he joined his buddy George W Bush in unleashing a human environmental catatrophe over Afghanistan and Iraq and, like PW Botha and Augusuto Pinochet, never expressed an iota of doubt and regret about his actions. Meanwhile, Afghanistan and Iraq continue to burn in spectacular fashion.
The good news is that Bush’s Republican Party received a relatively sound thrashing at the hands of the Democrats in the United States’s so-called mid-term elections. Former presidential contender John Kerry almost blew the whole thing when he proved to be a poor joke-maker and, instead of putting across the point that if you have an uneducated idiot in the White House you get bogged down in an unwinnable series of wars in the Middle East, gave the impression that the grunts on the frontline are themselves uneducated idiots.
Now, here was fodder for Bush’s Republicans to raise a storm in a teacup, as they say. They fondly imagined that this minor gaffe would turn around their fortunes in an election that they were clearly about to lose. Apart from anything else (and this is the point that all the commentators have failed to, shall we say, comment on) in a voluntary army such as the one that is indeed bogged down in the unfriendly desert, you have to be pretty much of a fool indeed to want to get stuck out there. But, instead of using that as his defence, Kerry spent two whole days trying to say that he wasn’t talking about the guys who were actually carrying lethal weapons on the front line. Like any patriotic American, he actually thought they were great guys. It was the president he was getting at, he said.
Anyway, the Republicans lost Congress in spite of all that. They lost a couple of seats in the Senate as well. Not that this means that much will change in American politics. Popular Democrat Jimmy Carter, if you remember well, almost got himself bogged down in a military debacle in Iran. Democrats John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson ensured that America’s highest post-World War II body bag count came out of an unjust war against Vietnam and the South-East Asia region generally. It took right-wing Republican president Richard Nixon to get them out of all that mess and take the kudos.
So it is not clear what the outcome is going to be for either Afghanistan or Iraq, even if some sleepy-eyed Democrat like John Kerry succeeds George W Bush when his time is finally up. For now, however, it is good news that the voting population of the US of A has said they’ve had enough Bush-speak about the war and its reasons, and are probably pissed off with his economic policies as well (given the disastrous Enron scandal, among others).
Meanwhile, the people of Iraq continue to suffer. And the post-apartheid South African government offers a moment of silence for the Great Crocodile, PW Botha, now technically extinct. Not that I’m depressed or anything.