Shyzer.com

Niyazov’s funeral, meanwhile, is scheduled for Sunday. A 10-kilometer (6-mile) corridor of mourning citizens will be created all the way from the Turkmenbashi Palace to the burial place in Niyazov’s home village of Kipchak.

If nothing else, that quote from CNN best sums up Niyazov’s reign. Rarely have you ever heard of a 6-mile corridor of mourning citizens having to be created in honor of a fallen leader.

I remember first reading about Saparmurat Niyazov a few years back. I had recently discovered the joys and wonders that are the CIA Factbook and I was spending a beautiful, gorgeous spring day deep underground, nerding it up amongst the stacks of history books and foreign language guides in the USC library. I was reading up on every country whose location on the globe I was oblivious to when I came to Turkmenistan. As I read, I came across this sentence: “[The] president [is] elected by popular vote for a five-year term; election last held 21 June 1992.”

Wait, what?

The last math class I may have taken was back in high school, but even I’m not that bad at math. At first, I just thought it was a typo, but I soon discovered it was anything but. In fact, it fit in perfectly with the other whirlwind of Crazy that Niyazov imposed on the Turkmen people.

• Slapping his face on every banknote in the country? Check.
• Erecting statues of himself and his mother that rotate to always face the sun? Check.
• Awarding himself the Hero of Turkmenistan award five times? Check.
• Banning news readers from wearing make-up since he had trouble telling male and female reporters apart? Check.
• Renaming a day of the week after himself and the month of April after his mother? Check & check.
• Outlawing gold tooth caps and gold teeth while suggesting that people instead check on bones to strengthen their teeth? A painful check.

Hell, renaming cities, airports, and schools after himself was a given. But what other dictator thinks of renaming a meteorite after themselves? Damn straight.

Niyazov might never have gotten the same press as Kim Jong-Il, Hugo Chavez, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but he certainly was right up there with them on the Crazy Barometer. Leaders like Niyazov are a dieing breed, for better or worse. (I’m guessing better for the people they actually rule over, worse for entertainment value for people like me) I think that’s part of the fascination the Western world has with them. Gone are the days of leaders such as Stalin and Hitler ruling their countries with an iron fist while wrecking global stability at the same time. Sure, you’ll never find me arguing that this is a bad thing, but you’ll also never find me passionately debating the values and merits of the new Ukrainian parliament election results. Why? Because that’s boring as hell.

Instead, you’ll find my (happily) mourning over today’s eccentric leaders, whom are quietly, if not quickly enough, falling to free elections and democratic rule, which makes their rise, reign, and eventual fall fun as hell to watch. Well, as long as you’re safely tucked away in America or Europe. And assuming you are outside their grasp of power, I can’t stress enough how much you should follow along. When else are you going to read and learn of leaders who write the only legal textbooks used throughout a countries education system? Or of leaders who close all hospitals outside of a country’s capital on the grounds that “why should we waste good medical specialists on the villages when they should be working in the capital?”

With Niyazov’s passing, the list of such leaders shrunk by one.

Like I said, the days of world domination desires by rogue countries is over. Instead, current dictators look only to maintain control over their own country and to a lesser extent, their region; a lesson I hope most Americans learned with the Iraq War debacle. But that doesn’t mean the Crazies aren’t out there and if you take a few minutes to read up on them, I promise you’ll quickly become enamored with one, if for no other reason than to find humor in a dismal situation.