no exit

There’s always been a feeling deep down that if ever life here in Absurdistan gets too bewildering – if ever I can’t bring myself to hack it anymore – I could always just go. Just go away as far as possible. Just go to outer Mongolia and take to the herdsman’s life on the open steppe. Forget it:

Enkhbayar, who claims to be the "Blair of the Steppes," and the MPRP surely need to find some fresh way of marketing themselves to the population if they are to consolidate their power.

One reason can be seen in the recent crisis. It is easy to look at it and conclude that Mongolia is just another post-communist country with an unstable party-political system, in which a volatile electorate has a parlous choice between fractious non-communist parties and ex-communists who don liberal-economic garb but are unwilling to wear sackcloth for their past crimes or to throw their red clothes out of the wardrobe. If it wants to emulate the electoral success of Britain's (New) Labor, it might help the MPRP to find a symbolic way, like Blair, to decouple the party's brand name from past policies.

The “Blair of the Steppes” is currently the President of Mongolia. I bet there are people sitting in yurts right now puzzling over the latest directive on the correct care and feeding of yaks and saying to themselves: what is this ASBO crap? What d’you mean I can’t go there. I’m a fucking nomad…