Darn, they missed!

Our fair Commonwealth is looking like a lonely bastion of stability in an increasingly chaotic area. Oceania and the western Pacific, in short, are starting to go bonkers.

Indonesia, of course, went off its rocker in Africa style chaos, after someone pointed out to El Dictator Suharto that his hat is as patently ugly and useless as an AMC Pacer. Things fell apart in 1998 and the country is still crumbling. Population wise, Indonesia is no small potatoes; over 216 million folks live there. Suharto’s funky taste in head wear, however, has endured the crisis unscathed.

As for an enduring crisis, there’s always the Republic of the Philippines. Just where do we start? Guerillas in the south, terrorist bombings in the north, and, for comic relief, that joker who jumped out of a hijacked airplane using a homemade parachute. Amongst the folks I know who profess to understand the Philippines, the feeling is that further nastiness is more, not less, likely in the near future. There is an invisible line between strife and total societal (and economic) breakdown, and inquiring minds have wondered if the Philippines might cross that line.

Across the equator’s line, we’ve got all sorts of weirdness brewing in the southern hemisphere, namely, Fiji. Now this really is a cool story in a sense; would-be dictator George Speight took over the country, or at least the nerve center of it, with something like six guys. That’s a pretty clean operation if you ask me. I’ve seen committees of six guys here in the CNMI that couldn’t manage to change a light bulb, and this guy Speight managed to change an entire government.

And, most recently, the Solomon Islands came unglued with all sorts of ethnic strife. One major issue: who is getting government jobs.
Hmm. Probably not an issue we need to delve into. Anyway, the good news is that rebels fired shots at two British politicians a couple of days ago. The bad news is that they missed.

I never gave the Solomon Islands much thought, but noted there are 455 thousand residents.

Closer to home, even good old Guam is going through some civil tremors, though not of a civil strife magnitude. Still, if Guam is determined, with diligent effort and sound planning it can become a mean, nasty, and surly welfare state just like the Caribbean “paradise” of Puerto Rico.

For my part, I engineered a bloodless coup on the lonely shores of Pagan island last year, since there was nobody there to dispute me. I declared myself Dictator for Life, but with nobody to dictate to my unchallenged reign seemed to be missing something. So I gracefully resigned, with nary a footnote in history to mark my dictatorial tenure. On the bright side of things, nobody jeered at my speeches, my retirement plan was better than Mussolini’s, and my hat was far better than Suharto’s.

That foray notwithstanding, the CNMI is a pond of tranquility in the Pacific’s troubled waters. We look downright harmonious in such a context. Perhaps we should place the Saipanda mascot in the garbage heap with the do-it-yourself parachutists and British food, and use this slogan: “Saipan…well, where ELSE can you go?”