Grvbřdhvnít!

"Grvbřdhvnít" is Georgian for "You (pl.) are tearing us apart," a helpful phrase to know in the current situation. It's pronounced as one syllable; no wonder they're all nuts.

Doug Muir has penned a very thoughtful response to my Gamsakhurdia post:

. . . That said, if you weren't a bit funny going into a Soviet psych ward, you had a pretty good chance of being so coming out. And this may have been the case with Gamsakhurdia. Certainly his later career showed signs of... well, "mental instability" covers a lot of ground, but in this case it fits. He was haughty, vindictive, had a genius for alienating potential allies, and never forgot a slight. He was prone to sudden outbursts of paranoid rage, where he'd rant on and on about his many enemies and their plots against him. His judgment was consistently horrible. The boy was just not right.

P.J.: Few political humorists have had so complete a collapse as P.J. O'Rourke. Up until 1990 -- the First Gulf War, to be precise -- he's both insightful and goddamn funny. After that, he very quickly becomes neither. The Gamsakhurdia piece comes early, but the process is already well advanced. Gamsakhurdia's supporters were ordinary Georgians, not because he was a populist, but because he'd rapidly alienated every section of the elite -- Communists, anti-Communists, intellectuals, bureaucrats, regional bosses, you name it. Basically he was left with people dumb or ill-informed enough to think he knew what he was doing.

It's not like Georgia is -- as some commentators have suggested -- some country that's uniquely unstable and hard to govern. Grey old Shevardnadze lasted a decade. Saakashvili is in his fifth year. Even the Menshevik government way back when had three reasonably stable years before the Soviets invaded. So, pissing that many people off that fast didn't happen because it was Georgia. It took a special kind of talent.

For more Muir on breakaway states, see his post on Transnistria. (David II, David III, and Noah: Read it; it's fun with class war.)