What visitors will find is a nation of First World amenities and infrastructure, and a place where optimism is perennially tested by unresolved Third World issues of poverty, crime, inflation, and racial tension. Already the undisputed economic engine of Africa—it accounts for 39 percent of sub-Saharan Africa's gross domestic product—South Africa still labors with plenty of fiscal shortcomings. One of them is that the recession did bite at least a little. Unemployment, which had been trending downward since 2006, rose in 2009 to 24 percent from 22 percent in 2008, throwing tens of thousands of mostly poor and middle-class black South Africans out of work.
...The country already generates two-thirds of the continent's electricity. Once a nation of tariffs, South Africa has liberalized its trade policies with its African neighbors; in 2008 it did $104.7 billion in business with the 46 other nations of sub-Saharan Africa.
The mines Malema would nationalize sit on huge reserves: South Africa has 90 percent of the world's platinum, 80 percent of its manganese, 73 percent of its chrome, and 41 percent of its gold, according to government estimates. South African farmers account for 8 percent of the country's exports and help feed Africa and the world. Roughly twice the size of Texas, South Africa also can boast a first-world freeway system, world-class banking and telecommunications systems, and a stock market that has attracted $41 billion in investments from the U.S., according to government data.
-South Africa: A Big Bounce from the World Cup
Earlier generations of women politicians (Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, up to a point even Hillary Clinton) were what is usually referred to as "phallic" women: they acted as "iron ladies" who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be "more men than men themselves." ...Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out how Sarah Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood. She has a "castrating" effect on her male opponents not by way of being more manly than them, but by using the ultimate feminine weapon, the sarcastic put-down of male authority -- she knows that male "phallic" authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked. Recall how she mocked Obama as a "community organizer," exploiting the fact that there was something sterile in Obama's physical appearance, with his diluted black skin, slender features, and big ears. Here we have "post-feminist" femininity without a complex, uniting the features of mother, prim teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public person, and, implicitly, sex object, proudly displaying the "first dude" as a phallic toy. The message is that she "has it all" -- and that, to add insult to injury, it was a Republican woman who had realized this Left-liberal dream...No wonder that the Palin effect is one of false liberation: drill, baby, drill!
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