You Never Know What’s Under The Garments: Political Cross-Dressing The New Fad
By Kumar David -October 6, 2013
Prof Kumar David
Methinks this world is oddly made
And everything’s amiss.
A sharp perceptive atheist said
His mind on higher things
Its official now, Jesuit Pope Francis says “Who am I to judge what these chaps may have been up to long ago?” So, aging Josephians, Benedictines and Peterites can sigh in relief. Nor need vintage Jesuits of celebrity status shrivel till indemnified by the Statute of Limitations. New fads have caught on in the political domain as well; driven by necessity, as rusted formulae die. Political cross-dressing is in vogue, at home and abroad: Mahinda versus Ranil, pray who is right and who is left (both puns intended); is Communist China a capitalist oxymoron; is Tony Blair a misbegotten Blatcherite toad; what happened to Obama radicalism and IMF neo-liberalism? No one, any longer, is what they are thought to be, nor manifest what they claim to proclaim. Everyone cross-dresses, not in degree alone but in pith and marrow. This is no smart-ass comment; it is deserving of considerable reflection.
Red-blooded socialists Bahu and Siritunga are in bed with Ranil; Mahinda’s UPFA, not past expiry-date UNP, is the living incubus of Lankan capitalism; Harsha, the UNP’s in-house economic bass unaha, rails against the IMF with a verve and nerve that Bahu and Siri can no longer muster. JR, we learnt, was a trigger happy and ruthless autocrat; now Mahinda is autocrat, Gotha ruthless avenger. Aren’t leftists in the UNP-led opposition taking their cue from Mahinda devotee Vasudeva and spent cartridges Tissa and DEW? Don’t take offence if you are a disciple of any of these worthies, running them down is not my point. The point is that boundaries are smudged, programmes obscured, differences muddled and the urgency of immediacy (not necessarily expediency) propels decisions. Are these gentlemen all wrong, or are the categories of thought of yesteryear that rule our lazy minds, outdated? The truth is that it’s a bit of each; but before that, let’s look at the big wide world.
