No one believes it, but everyone believes that someone believes!
View(s):When your old, long-in-the-tooth scribe (yes, dear, a glory has passed!) was a mere toddler, the terror of the town – a pickpocket and also a break-in artist – was paraded through the streets. Now the borough where I was born, bred, and baptised had been terrorised by a gang of bandits. In the days before terror became an institution among law-breakers and law-enforcers alike, being a petty thief or a villainous rogue or a marauding robber was just about de rigueur for the criminal classes. So when the local constabulary nabbed a particularly thuggish representative of the trade, together with a clutch of his cohorts from the underworld of that day and age (which had not gone mainstream, as it has today), it was something of a cause célèbre at the time.
He and his minions were marched through the town square, as it were, with a few hefty members of the law-enforcement establishment encouraging them along with gentle prods of their knouts. Oh, did I mention that they were stark naked? (The villains of the piece, I mean… No no, the villainous rogues; not the coppers or cozzers or rozzers!)
Gone are the days. Now just about anybody who is somebody is keen on the Lady Godiva act. The naked-parade part has become par for the course for two-bit politicos and chief executives alike. Do you doubt it, dears? Why, only the other day a provincial elected representative promised to go walkabout in his hometown – in his birthday suit – if it was proven that he had confiscated property that was not his. Of course, the rub is that no one can or will or shall prove that any misdemeanour of the land-grab kind had taken place. Far bigger fish than this small fry have been accused of similar transgression sans any repercussions of the legal variety. Let’s pretend for the sake of our Sabbath peace and ongoing safety that we don’t quite know who or what I’m talking about, shall we, landlubbers and landed gentry!
Into this fashionable club of would-be nude marchers-past has sauntered a very eminent person of late. He, while not quite of the terrifying ilk of him who must not be named, is so great a personage that we had best tread as cautiously as our editors would wish your old yellow journo or guttersnipe to tread courteously. So, rather than relate the sad sordid story of his wannabe-exposed eminence, let me tell you the tale of an entirely different leader (we will let you unravel the rationale or relationship, if any) whose recent antics overseas have become the talk of the town at home. Let us call him the Mikado, the Lord High Poo-Bah, the Grand Panjandrum. Take your pick, dear…
What our Mik, the Lord H. P.-B., this Grand P., said must give us all – who, of course, even though we live in a democracy (and not some tin-pot tyrannical dictatorship like our media celebrity), can relate – pause. He claimed that his banana republic was a democracy – like ours… that the country’s long civil war is over and there is no security issue – like ours… that the recent spate of attacks on spiritual minorities are not the work of chauvinists close to the ruling religious elite – like ours… that abductions and disappearances are carried out in blue or black vans… and not white, like ours…
Whom do you feel more for: the nameless faceless leader of this shameless banana republic – or the stand-up solid leadership of our own nation-state, which has to tolerate such trivia from rotten rapporteurs and banalities from purveyors of international conspiracies to allegedly expose us?
Stop shifting uncomfortably in your favourite Sunday barca-lounger, would you, dear… I’m quite nervous enough for both of us as it is! I mean to say, just hope and pray that the powers which be in our own perfectly functioning democracy won’t mistakenly assume that what I have said above – tongue in cheek – is a thinly veiled satire on our own state of the nation? No no, there’s no danger of that… Is there? After all, if our own democratically elected leaders were to grant a gracious interview overseas out of the generosity of their hearts, they’d not prevaricate so brazenly (or stoop so low or swoop so high) to bamboozle the world’s weary, sceptical, and cynical viewers, would they? No. Indeed. Not.
Thus while we can ridicule or chide our two-bit local politicos for their would-be nude parades à la exposed land-grabber, if it was discovered by anyone they had done wrong, we can rest assured that our democratically elected leaders would not have to be chased out of office despite their long lineage of leading the country down the garden path… Or chased down the street naked, shorn of the emperor’s new clothes, could or should they be in any wise exposed for having cheated their citizens at elections; stolen sustainably from what should have benefitted state coffers; or lied through their long-experienced political teeth. Long live our leaders! They, for one (or more) are no exposed emperors-with-no-clothes-on!
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