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So, who is on cloud cuckooland?
Bill Saidi
August 16, 2008

http://www.thezimbabwestandard.com/opinion/18695-so-who-is-on-cloud-cuckooland.html

Someone once said to be successful one must project a disposition of success.

I know it wasn't Dale Carnegie, Chaminuka, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Spock or Sigmund Freud.

Morever, there has been no evidence so far that this disposition has worked. I don't remember Bill Gates, Phillip Chiyangwa or Mutumwa Mawere crediting their success solely to the projection of success before they achieved it.

People with their feet firmly planted on the ground might argue that this is no better than living on Cloud Cuckooland. This refers to "an (unrealistically) idealistic state where everything is perfect".

Between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, two men tussling for political control of a country which everybody knows has real potential to be a perfect model of success, who is on Cloud Cuckooland?

Mugabe recently warned the people "not to sell the country to the enemy." There is no need to consult Socrates, Pericles, Aristotle, Plato, Archbishop Makarios, Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, Groucho and Karl Marx, John Foster Dulles, Ben Gurion or Masipula Sithole, as to which enemy is being referred to.

Tsvangirai has said many things too, but has stuck with the position that the 29 March presidential election was overwhelmingly in his favor.

So, as far as he is concerned, handing this potentially wonderful country to the enemy could not conceivably be a reference to the MDC.

By the way, being on Cloud Cuckooland "hints that the person referred to is naïve, unaware of reality or deranged in holding such an optimistic belief".

An ancient play called The Birds by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes is referred to as the origin of the expression.

If any readers mistake the author to be a contemporary of Zorba The Greek, the film in which a non-Greek actor, Anthony Quinn, played the leading role, then we must all say many Hail Marys for them.

Seasoned politicians like Mugabe must always embrace politics as the art of the possible, which basically means that they will say anything if they believe a majority of the people will trust they are not lying through their teeth.

This is not a psychological attribute of men like Mugabe alone.

Entrepreneurs like Cecil John Rhodes and his band of capitalist, colonialist adventurers, embraced this same philospphy. They invaded a small African country in 1890 and gave it the name of the aforementioned gentleman.

The play referred to has Pisthetaiaros (Mr Trusting) and Euelphanes (Mr Hopeful), with the help of Tereus, tired of the earth and Olympus, deciding to erect a perfect city between the clouds, to be named Cloud Cuckooland".

You could say Mugabe, in refusing to believe he lost the 29 March election and his charade of 27 June was a genuine show of support for his presidency is living a lie.

Tsvangirai, in believing that Mugabe entered the talks with a genuine desire to reverse the 27 June circus and cede real power to the former trade unionist, could also be said to be the naïve one.

Yet when you start to examine the backgrounds - political or otherwise -of these two men, one fact seems inescapable: it is Mugabe who has had to swallow his pride, eat humble pie or crow - if you are enamoured of such foul language.

To put it very politely, Mugabe can only be living on Cloud Cuckooland if he believes the world took his bombardistic sloganeering as the genuine declaration of a man dedicated to the future prosperity of his country - and not the wishful, geriatric rantings of a politician aware that the end of his career is nigh.

Zimbabwe shall never be a colony again. In reality - and not on Cloud Cuckooland - this would entail the return of the British as the rulers of Zimbabwe. Even figuratively, it would mean the British controlling the entire economy and shipping all the profits to the Motherland, with Zimbabweans, as they did during colonialism, feeding on the crumbs from the high tables of the colonizers.

There is something eeriely familiar here. Today, most people who voted against Mugabe and Zanu PF last March, are wallowing in squalor unimaginable under colonialism.

Believing they are ecstatic about this is cruel. It suggests they are not just naive, but could be idiots as well.

saidib@standard.co.zw

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