Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like Xanadu

by David Benjamin

“Kings are like stars. They rise and set, they have the worship of the world, but no repose.”— Percy Bysshe Shelley

MADISON, Wis. — Since monarchy fell out of fashion, it’s gotten tougher to be an autocrat. Donald Trump, for example, appeared to be rising unstoppably toward a sort of reich amerikanisch. But then, his whole op got queered by a couple of hayseed secretaries of state and a landscaping outfit in Philly.

While pundits fret over a spike in strong-man populism, the world’s only truly comfy despots are Vlad Putin and Xi Jinping. Today’s would-be Stalins must stay constantly alert, lest they’re ambushed by disloyal flunkies, scheming generals, jealous spouses, traitorous children, street protests, self-immolating monks, guerrilla militias storming the palace, oil, lumber, mining and agribusiness tycoons, locusts, mosquitos, bad weather and pandemics, snipers, assassins and suicide bombers, not to mention the territorial ambitions of Putin and Xi.

My friend, Dr. Wilhelm “Kaiser Bill” Bienfang, world’s foremost “idea man,” listed these modern menaces to the “divine right” that Roman emperors and Henry VIII used to enjoy, and he said, “A 21st-century tyrant has to keep a go-bag by the door and the keys in the Ferrari. He must be poised to cheezit the minute the junta votes to stage a coup and drop the fat bastard into the crocodile pit.”

“But where’s he gonna go?” I prompted.

“Exactly,” said Bienfang. “He needs to land softly in a place where he can continue his accustomed lifestyle of greed, cruelty, gluttony, lust and wretched excess. But where? A condo in Paris? A villa on the Costa de Sol. A mountain retreat like Kehlsteinhaus? That stuff is so 20th-century. Besides, at today’s prices, you’d be blowing hundreds of millions in hard-earned graft for a glorified retirement home with bad plumbing and bourgeois neighbors.”
“What about,” I suggested, “something like Mar-a-Lago?”

“Oh, spare me,” scoffed Bienfang. “It’s cramped and decrepit, barely bigger than Louis XVI’s chicken coop. The humidity’s murder, it’s crawling with mildew and it sits smack-dab in the middle of Hurricane Alley. And as soon as we melt two more glaciers in Switzerland, the joint’ll be underwater ten months of the year.”

Suddenly, I was anxious for the comfort of the world’s endangered dictators.

“What can we do?” I pleaded.

Bienfang, of course, was ready. In a sweeping gesture, he unfurled a brilliantly colored, richly detailed map depicting a vast complex of sprawling walled “compounds” carpeted with swimming pools in a hundred cunning shapes. There were cabanas and guest houses, blindingly green golf courses, parade grounds, helipads, chapels, streams and snow-capped mini-mountains with waterfalls flowing from their fissures. I saw fountains and reflecting pools flanked by statues and colonnades. Wandering the grounds and forests was a menagerie of horses, camels, giraffes, ostriches, elephants, purebred dogs and strutting peacocks. Tiny children, too, frolicked on the greensward and swung merrily ’round Maypoles. And populating the pools and patios were women — willing, wanton Victoria’s Secret models wearing almost nothing, swimming, oiling, tanning, lounging, undressing, drinking fruity cocktails with little umbrellas and wedges of pineapple.

“I call it,” said Bienfang, glowing with pride, “Dictatorville.”

My mind, of course, boggled, a familiar effect with Bienfang. “Where?”

“It’s an island, in an undisclosed location,” said Bienfang. “I signed an option on half the archipelago the day after Abdalla Hamdok got his walking papers in Khartoum. Poor old Abby, y’see, is the canary in the gold mine.”

“But wasn’t Hamdok reinstated a few days later?”

“You miss the point, son,” said Bienfang. “He’s sitting in the lap of luxury on top of a powder keg. Right now, he’s the richest son of a bitch for a thousand miles in every direction. Tomorrow, he could be strapped to a chair, watching his former Minister of Culture pull out his fingernails. The question that haunts his every waking moment is where can he escape. What refuge can possibly approach the opulence, adulation, raw drunken power and easy sex that he gets in his presidential palace?”

“Dictatorville?”

“Right the first time, kiddo. We’ll be offering, to an elite group of dethroned dictators, every perk they enjoyed when they were starving the masses, murdering journalists, subjugating women, burning temples and decapitating dissidents. Every lucky Dictatorvillian will be hip-deep in babes, recruited from the cream of the porn industry. If. however, he prefers very young girls — or boys — well, we’ve already made an offer to Jeffrey Epstein’s pimp. There will be a Praetorian guard, dressed like the cast of HMS Pinafore — shakos with feathers, spiked helmets, gold braid, lots of shiny buttons, patent-leather jackboots, chrome-plated rifles, lances, banners and flags, Myrmidon brigades goose-stepping around the parade-ground while marching bands blare and throngs of adoring subjects — hired for the job — chant the egomaniac moron’s name and cheer wildly whenever he waves.”
Bienfang paused and winked. “And of course, to enhance the necessary illusion of power, we’ll provide each client a steady flow of captured rebels, journalists and feminists to be interrogated, tortured and killed, gruesomely.”

“You’re gonna kill people — and reporters?”

“No, son. You don’t get it,” said Bienfang. “These sadistic pricks never soil their own hands. They assign the wet work to others. Then they glow with pleasure when they see photos of mangled corpses lining the corridors of the national stadium.”

“Okay, so, no actual murders?”

“Of course not,” said Bienfang. “Dictatorville is a theme park for sociopaths. An illusion. I’s all done with actors, computer graphics and stock photos.”

I offered a quibble. “A despot — Nero, Hitler, Stalin — is a megalomaniac. He loves power and craves more of it. He can decide life or death, for thousands of people, with a shrug. Why give that up to move into a fake, plastic Eagle’s Nest?”

“First of all, remember,” said Bienfang. “This capricious coward is scared to death of all those thousands. His palace is a nest of scorpions. Our brochures for Dictatorville will document the prospect — with pictures — that, too often, your fat and sassy ’president for life’ ends up swinging from a gibbet in the courtyard of his own castle, with his girlfriend in the next noose over.”

Bienfang said, “Besides, here’s the trick: Dictatorville’s gonna be real hard to get into. Only the most despicable regimes will make the cut. There’s only room for eight tenants. To prove his sheer rottenness (and worthiness for admission), each dictator’s application will require volumes of written and video evidence. And then he’ll have to wait — like getting into an Ivy League school — to see if he’s accepted. Instead of battling their local freedom fighters, the worst guys on earth will be be conniving against one another for a chance to jump the Dictatorville queue.”

“But how can you pay for this?” I began.

Bienfang smiled grimly. “Simple. I’m going to bill the world for the cost of every gold-plated bust and marble bathhouse on the island, for every nightly fireworks show, for every opera company, ballet troupe and NFL game, and for every whore, toady, movie star, plastic surgeon, golf pro and Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Famer we send to Dictatorville. And the world will pay. Gladly and thankfully!”

Bienfang added, “I mean, what’s a few billion bucks a month when you’re making sure that evil pricks like Erdogan, Maduro, Kim, Trump and that Nobel Prize psycho in Ethiopia will never get their slimy hands on our kids?”