Under Watch: Fidel Castro and Mexico’s Obrador
Under watch:
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, 80, recuperating from stomach surgery. His megalomania has always baffled me, since it’s believed he drinks little. However, as suggested in the “runners-up”section, he may be, like Yasir Arafat, an amphetamine or cocaine addict. Behavioral evidence that his emotional state is stuck in his teens (the emotional state of the addict gets “stuck”the day he or she triggers addiction) can be found in the fact that, as Pope John Paul II’s biographer George Weigel puts in a piece entitled, “Don’t cry for him, Cubanos,”in The Los Angeles Times, “I remember walking the streets of Havana [in January 1998]…thinking that this is what a country would look like if it were run for decades by a group of vicious teenagers.”He also recalls “the barren shelves in the pharmacies, with not even an aspirin to be had, despite the propaganda about Cuban healthcare.”He remembered a prostitute, a “well-spoken medical doctor who, when I asked why she was selling herself, told me that it was the only way to support her children.”Long live the revolution, Fidel. And a personal message to Mike Wallace, formerly of CBS’s “60 Minutesâ€: stop enabling despots. If you heard his recent despicable interview regarding “el maximo lider,”you know what I’m talking about.
Former Mexico City mayor and Mexican Presidential candidate Lopez Obrador, while contending that the recent presidential election was marked by fraud, promised to “make the country ungovernable.”His supporters have blockaded key roads in Mexico City for the last month and pledge to prevent winner Felipe Calderon from being sworn in on December 1. Obrador has vowed to keep the protest movement going until the government is brought down and to block moves to allow increased participation by private industry in everything from oil and electricity to pension funds. “If I don’t get my way, why I’ll huff and huff and blow your house down.”I’d suggest that Mr. Obrador grow up, but if I’m right, his emotional growth is stuck at about age 13.
Note to family, friends and fans of the above: the benefit of the doubt is given by assuming alcoholism (they are either idiots and fundamentally rotten, or they are alcoholic/other drug addicts?which would explain the misbehaviors). If alcoholic, there is zero chance that behaviors, in the long run, will improve without sobriety. An essential prerequisite to sobriety is the cessation of enabling, allowing pain and crises to build. Thus far, many have done everything they can to protect the addict from the requisite pain, making these news events possible. The cure for alcoholism, consequential bad behaviors and, ultimately, tragedy, is simple: stop protecting the addict from the logical consequences of misbehaviors and proactively intervene.