re: #108 Lupin

A page from Southern France:

In trying to explain what’s going on in the US right now to my unsophisticated fellow villagers here in the South of France, I found a useful short hand: Zimbabwe.

Now i feel bad because i don’t really know anything about Zimbabwe, and neither do they, really. For all I know it could be a well-run, corruption-free, model African country. But we all know the *image* it conjures up. Credit where credit’s due, I think I got the idea from Trevor Noah’s photo of Trump as a tinpot African military dictator.

But right now, using “Zimbabwe” (a likely partly fictional Zimbabwe) helps me explain things in a way that no other analogy did — the way “Versailles” used to be a good analogy for the DC elites. They understand what America has become/is becoming.
Truthfully, they understood the Iraq invasion better. Since Katrina (see: response, lack of) this is the first time I’ve seen the natives that bemused by what’s going on in the US.

Zim is what America could be, if we were to allow Trump to stay in office another 20 years while he quashes every opposition party or candidate to ensure his party retains power. Robert Mugabe is the quintessential tinpot dictator, a man who made his country his own personal bank account while tanking its economy.