Yes, he has no bananas: Mugabe runs out of time ... and everything else.

• Author: Bloom, John
• Position: Despot Watch - Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe

WHAT possessed Robert Mugabe to start wearing the wispy little Hitlerian mustache? Fortunately, he has the big saucer eyeglasses and the statesmanlike receding hairline to announce his grandfatherly intentions. We could send over the cast of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" to straighten him out, but unfortunately, the entire cast would be seized and imprisoned for ten years as soon as they set foot in Zimbabwe, under Mugabe's "worse than dogs or pigs" statutes. Mugabe used these laws to throw Zimbabwe's ex-president, Canaan Banana, into prison, claiming all gays contribute to the MDS crisis (highest infection rate in the world; 20 percent of the Zimbabwean population; 2,000 dying each week). Besides having a name that sounds like someone who would march in the Gay Pride Parade, Mr. Banana had been caught in flagrante aardvarko, and so the dignity of the state was at risk.

Robert Mugabe must get a lot of email from the Pope. As the last great Roman Catholic dictator, Mugabe can't risk the confessional in a nation full of spies and enemies and vengeance-seeking widows, so I would imagine he improvises. He uses the old "enemies of the state" stratagem. There were those who said that Canaan Banana--sorry, I can't help repeating the name--was simply a political enemy who was conveniently removed when he misused his banana. But normally, Mugabe is not shy about simply saying, "He's a traitor." Virtually none of the traitors are traitors in the Western sense. They are traitors only under the narrow definition of failing to support the Zimbabwe African National Union-Popular Front Party. (And doesn't that just trip nicely off the tongue? It must be hell at outdoor rallies. "All together now: Zimbabwe African National Union-Popular Front Forever! Okay, again! Zimbabwe African ...")

At any rate, Mugabe's willingness to designate virtually anyone, including the official weather forecaster, as an enemy of the state, is a fairly common occupational quirk among despots both ancient and modern. In Mugabe's case, it's a self-deception, but I think it's an honest self-deception. He really does think that any enemy of him personally is an enemy of Zimbabwe. After all, he has all those United Nations citations to prove that he's a good guy, doing the best he can.

I think it's important to Mugabe to be remembered as a good guy. He's eighty years old and has so many ailments (cancer of the throat, cancer of the prostate, at least one stroke) that he must know he's dying, and yet he holds onto power like a possessed man. (Somehow you can't imagine Mugabe taking one of those Boston University retired-dictator-in-residence gigs.) He's reached the stage that corresponds to the last three years of Ivan the Terrible's life, when suddenly Ivan decided he needed to find the names of every single person he had ever killed, take them to a church, and have a priest read them out and bless them. This was a considerable undertaking, requiring thousands of bureaucrats inquiring in hundreds of places. Ivan, like Mugabe, was a religious man, and he sensed a reckoning.

What's odd in Mugabe's case is that while he's cracking up, he's also still cracking down. Two of his most recent legal fictions--the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (to deal with the press) and the Public Order and Security Act (to deal with opposition parties)--are reminiscent of Stalin in the 1930s. He's basically given himself the right to arrest, imprison, torture, suppress and--that staple of Marxists everywhere--invent anything that he needs. I'm not kidding about the weather forecaster. When the national weather forecasting service recently predicted two more years of drought, Mugabe seized control of the service and ordered that all future forecasting be in the form of secret memos to himself, followed by rosy rewriting for the official press release. Mugabe's brain right now regards the weather itself as subversive. (Yeah, nature as enemy: it's like when Xerxes ordered the Hellespont lashed a hundred times for destroying his pontoon attack bridge to Europe.) The last three years have pretty much ruined his international reputation, so all he has left to fight for is the idea that no one ever turned him out, that the people still want him, that Zimbabwe is Mugabe.

Well, unfortunately, Zimbabwe is not even Zimbabwe anymore. Mugabe may get email from the Pope, but what the rest of us get is African spam from guys claiming to be Mugabe's relatives or Zimbabwean government officials who have stolen money they want to slip into your account. There are several reasons that Zimbabwe is the most popular country used for spam con games. One is that it's impossible to actually check anything in Zimbabwe. The government is in chaos, the telecommunications system barely works, and most of the honest bureaucrats have been driven out. The idea that a Zimbabwean official would even bare functional email is a stretch. The second reason is that there are hundreds of...