A Pig By Any Other Name Stinks Just As Much

I know this will sound pretty shocking, but I'm eternally grateful to Illinois Governor Rod "The Tool" Blagojevich for being a brazen, disgustingly greedy old school pol with nary a moral or scruple in sight.

He's actually given me the only Christmas gift I really need this year. You see, after nearly six months of living in Nairobi, I was really starting to feel battered by the constant onslaught of media coverage and public debate about political corruption in Kenya. Every day, there's a new "scandale" related to the post-election violence, or the food shortages, or Parliament's refusal to pay taxes on its obscene salaries and perks. And it's all rooted in a culture of impunity, lack of accountability and complete self-interest among politicians.

Because I work in the media, I can't put it out of my mind. What's worse, TV channels here are so limited, I can't even come home every night and tune out and turn off my brain with a steady dose of TV Land or Seinfeld reruns. (Even my beloved Turner Classic Movies are only aired from about 7 PM to 7 AM each day, and I swear Africa must be getting their third-tier offerings. Most of the movies aired don't interest me in the least, and I rarely say that about a classic movies channel.)

Let's just say my consciousness has been marinating in political chaos for almost 6 months straight. And not just from Kenya--I also can't avoid the quagmire of Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Oh, and what would my day be without an update from the hurly burly of South African bureaucracy?And then there's Rwanda, and Burundi...

Pour a couple of quarts of Holiday Humdrums on top of that toxic stew, and I've been pretty morose lately. I haven't posted anything here because it seems trivial to moan about my problems in this atmosphere. Plus, it's been sooooo easy to indulge in a bit of homesickness. Everything over here seems so corrupt and out of control, I thought. If I could just get back to America, where this level of malevolent self-interest at the expense of the electorate doesn't occur.....

DUH!!!

Along comes Rod to remind me that maniacal greed, ravening ego and stellar self delusion do not respect geographic boundaries. I mean, his behavior makes all the other Illinois governors who've been indicted or gone to jail look like choirboys who stole a few quarters from the collection plate. His sewer of a mouth makes Nixon sound like a Holy Roller. His naked ambition makes Madonna look like an understudy.

Although my heart breaks over yet another scar on my homestate's battered political reputation, Blagojevich's astronomical political sleazebaggery has helped jolt me out of the doldrums. I would love to keep pretending that because vastly more than 50 percent of Americans have access to clean water, and any girl there can go to school, and myriads of people don't starve to death every day, that means that political corruption in the US is less appalling than in developing countries.

But Rod has hipped me to the haps. There's no place on the face of the earth to escape the human condition, which includes insane piggishness like Governor B's. And if it oinks like a pig and stinks like a pig, it's a pig, whether it's in Nairobi or in Chicago.

Dude, thanks for the badly needed reality check.