Release the Hounds!

Imagine Michael Jackson or Wayne Newton directing their own country, able to make whatever decrees and laws they wished at any time, all opposition forbidden or crushed. A place somewhere between Never Never Land and Las Vegas, patroled by secret police. Would you like to live in such a place?

On the other hand, what if you were the dictator?

What if you had the power to declare yourself greatest poet, greatest fiction writer, greatest memoirist and historian and spiritualist in a land of six million people run at your every whim?

You could name calendar months after yourself and your mother, have spinning golden statues and gigantic portraits of your smiling face everywhere, make yourself required reading to every child in every classroom, have whole product lines of food and booze named in your honor, and never have to answer to anyone?

Such was reality for Saparmurat Niyazov Turkmenbashi (2/19/1940-12/21/2006), Father of all Turkmen, President of Turkmenistan and Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers, a person far stranger than anything offered up by Borat. He had everything he could hope for short of immortality. Must have been "a God/Allah thing," good kharma, or just plain bizarre good luck. "Everything happens for a reason." And God said: Let there be a Father of All Turkmen who looks like Wayne Newton with a dash of Dean Martin, and the people said, Amen! God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our Dictator! Where can we sign up?

What happens when the leader of Never Never Land dies? Après moi le déluge -- release the hounds!

Who now can top the Great Turkmenbashi, Father of all Turkmen,
"friend" to both the USA and Russia in the "War on Terror"? With friends like these. . . . . NEVER EVER FORGET: we must always trust our governments, our leaders, and the status quo.

But I'll tell you this, in the words of Mel Brooks, "It's good to be the King!"

Today's Rune: The Blank Rune.

Ene de görüshyanchak!