The long weekend is over for legislators and electors alike

Is it bearable, this oppression by reactionary elites who have captured the state, for the sake of ostensible stability in the short term... even if exploring the alternatives – and there is a raft of these – means facing and overcoming the ‘fear psychosis’ (or false propaganda) of the much-dreaded return to vistas of austerity? Or do we owe those who were arguably the worst off – some of my readers may be in the same boat or at the bottom of the same pool – under a cabal that brought a country to its knees and a nation to bankruptcy? 

Over the ‘long weekend’ a few days ago, an immersive editorialist – like a few other ordinary folks in Sri Lanka lucky enough to be able to savour it – was pleased to be tasked to enjoy some down time on an out-of-town getaway. 

Bet you a thousand bucks 10-to-1 that amidst all the beers and BBQs from Negombo to Bentota to Arugam Bay, the ‘hot topic’ of convo when the party broke from downing a ‘cool one’ to embracing the burning coals of pressing issues was the presidential poll ahead.

In my own case, first to take the plunge – literally into that pool which makes me nostalgic now, as well as metaphorically into the cauldron of serious conversation – was yours truly.

I (rather foolishly as it turned out) essayed a hypothesis that many of us islanders were caught on the horns of dilemma, trapped between a strong desire for survival in the short term on the one hand and an equally strong impulse for social justice for long-outstanding issues on the other.

But I was soon enough shut down by a brace of not-so-youthful-any-more-young-boys from the ‘one-man brigade’. 

They would have stopped the gab of this gob, brazen enough to spout breathlessly about social justice. 

After it was made as clear as the bottom of the pool they dunked me in that all anybody wants these days is to get by, stay safe and never mind the indigents. 

“Like this, let’s go.” But hands off buddy! I need air...

But could only A Man have done it, or would teams of likeminded opposition politicos with the same party DNA as a benevolent despot have done as well?

I surfaced for momentary safety and breathed another fusillade about long-postponed justice, for a litany of crimes, by an ensconced cabal, against the angry citizens of Sri Lanka. Whose cries for ‘system change’ have been strangely muted since their cause was supposedly hijacked by radicals during the Aragalaya. 

And/or goose-stepped on by the resurgent regime after the objective of ejecting a sitting chief executive who was one-part arrogant and one-part incompetent and all parts a total embarrassment was achieved. Cui bono?

He was, it would appear in hindsight now, succeeded by a president by proxy, supported by parliamentary legality and yet (sorry to have to say again) lacking in legitimacy for a raft of reasons. 

Despite the evident good that a canny-enough chief executive’s savvy-enough administration has accomplished in a tad over two years, there are those with a mind – and a meme – to say: ‘You have sat there long enough for all the good it hasn’t done... Godot must go – no more waiting for dreams of development to come true at snail’s pace...’

Not much justice there – one must admit. Though the queues and critiques are remarkably foreshortened? 

Because after all, our god is in our stomachs! 

So yes, lads and ladies: exercise a measure of prudence before adding a chorus of ‘Goodbye Old Boy, and thanks for all the gas!’ to the line-up of karaoke hits...

There is, admittedly, a lot to be said ‘on the other side’...

From bringing a modicum of law and order (albeit through truncheon, teargas and water-cannon as much as magistrates and moderately meaningful policing unmindful of civic and human rights)... Even if it meant (as the apex court found) trashing the civil rights of a cross section of citizens. 

Through ending essential and commodity shortages; although the perks and privileges for sycophants and supporters of the regime is only slighter longer than the list of scams for senior public officials’ benefits.

And on to the pièce de la résistance of forging – that word cuts both ways – and superintending an economic reforms package under the cautiously-watchful eye of the IMF, the neoliberals’ go-to port in sixteen, now seventeen, national storms. 

But could only A Man have done it, or would teams of likeminded opposition politicos with the same party DNA as a benevolent despot have done as well?

Just hear ‘this side’ also... 

A regime that majors on legality and regulations over legitimacy and sweet reasonableness: the City loves it, but the centre of civil society cannot hold. Mere anarchy is a ballot’s casting away... 

An uneasy sense in town square and marketplace (although the City, mark my meaning, remains agnostic to that queasy feeling) that it is ‘business as usual’ by all ‘the usual suspects’. It is one major scam per term as we are discovering to our discomfiture in chamber and cocktail circuit. 

And to crown it all: the burden of consequence for poor fiscal management having to be borne by those most unable to bear the heavy tax regimen. 

As much as all the bureaucratic bumf that comes in shades of cronyism feathering its nest, corruption as a statistic to conveniently press the case for top-down reforms. 

And a consolidation of the paternalism that successive governments good at patron-client politics have stuffed down the throats of democrats, republicans, patricians inimical to pseudo-patriotism, plebeians and proletarians alike.

Sorry for a rant. It tends to make one spout out as much as one can when one is ducked repeatedly for speaking truth to power, which is to say telling my partying friends a home truth or six.

Holding a man underwater however, citing survival and refusing to let him resurface lest he entertain any unwelcome notions about letting lame-duck socialists into the pool, seems to be the only party game in town for some.

Therefore before I went down to what passed for Davy Jones’ locker in that southwestern coastal pool in a sublime villa where the elites drowned their piddling sorrows in single malts and their poor friends in the briny, I spluttered out a few last blubs about the balance of the thing at hand...

Is it bearable, this oppression by reactionary elites who have captured the state, for the sake of ostensible stability in the short term... even if exploring the alternatives – and there is a raft of these – means facing and overcoming the ‘fear psychosis’ (or false propaganda) of the much-dreaded return to vistas of austerity?

Or do we owe those who were arguably the worst off – some of my readers may be in the same boat or at the bottom of the same pool – under a cabal that brought a country to its knees and a nation to bankruptcy? 

(Though in the same breath, we take with a pinch of salt the hooray henries who now claim they would never have declared an inability to service sovereign debts.)

There is now, perhaps more than ever, an idea obvious to all but opaque to the boys in the shallow end of the blue-tinged green pool that we – swimming with sharks as we are – need to steer clear of sordid fantasies about national saviours and only one point of view about national salvation to keep all afloat.

And the long weekend in which legislators were able to dictate terms to a polity literally starving for provender, as well as facts-based rather than ad-hoc or self-serving policymaking, is over... 

As much as the holiday in which we, the electors, had only aragalayas, people’s movements and voting by the exercise of popular sovereignty on the streets is over... 

Even if the teams of those who would deliver us from evil and give us tomorrow our daily bread scare us more than the hollow men of today, leaning together, their headpiece filled with straw and strange notions tantamount to state capture by their elite cronies? 

We owe it to ourselves. As well as everyone else swimming for survival – or who drowned in the struggles of yesteryear – to look beyond our safety, security, sensibility.

Of course, we must investigate far more closely – and with the hermeneutic of suspicion close at hand too – the claims and motives of those who say they will punish the perpetrators for their crimes. 

Because – what crimes? whose? and for how far back into our wretched sociopolitical misadventures? But yes, the blood and brains and brain-drains of those historically wronged do cry out. And we on our perpetual long-weekend away from reality ignore it at our peril, risking the republic’s downfall.          

 

| Editor-at-large of LMD | 

Notes from the deep-end |