The old joke is that politics is the oldest profession. Yes, even older than (er, shall we say) soliciting. For while ‘solicitors’ (and we don’t mean that in the legal sense) want power with responsibility, politicos want exactly the same thing. No, wait. That’s not the punch line. Remind me, dears. Ah, yes. Politics is the oldest profession because while doctors may have been involved in cloning from a rib, and engineers in building from chaos, the moot point of who created the chaos in the first place is neatly resolved by fingering politics.
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Today, though, politicos no longer seem to have the monopoly on creating chaos. Society is clogged with artisans who have taken the science of bringing chaos out of order to a connoisseur’s art. The traffic police may make a profession out of it (thank you, dears, for your untiring efforts; which go largely unnoticed except when there’s a snafu). Some trade unions seem to get a living out of it (being, as it is suspected, in the pockets of shadowy social agitators – sorry, chaps).
University students have taken it up as a hobby and a pastime whenever they can take a bit of time out from mugging it up to be the productive citizens of tomorrow (please don’t misunderstand, folks, we do sympathize; but could you limit your protests to the pretty campuses we’d be loath to venture out of save to march on the presidential palace as the very last resort before anarchy descends).
Most recently it has been the media’s turn to make a tad more than a nuisance of itself. Its ‘Black January’ protest possibly best expresses in physical form the mental and emotional anguish that many likeminded civil libertarians were and are now feeling. That it failed to make an impression on the powers that be other than to provoke a magistrate to order the local precinct of the long arm of the law to prevent the protestors stretching their legs beyond the confines of a downtown borough is neither here nor there (like the media representatives themselves, many of whom went home feeling slightly bemused).
Part of the problem is that socio-political protests in the land today only tend to strengthen the hand of what editorialists are fond of describing as an oppressive regime. (Or authoritarian government, or patronage politics, or strong arm strategy, or – but why do I feel I am losing your interest? You get the point. Don’t you, dears?) Where did all those protests over the assets bill and the pension scheme, the plastic crates business, and substandard cement, petrol, and rice get anyone? Well, exactly. There you are, you see.
Even the political opposition has learned its lesson and is exemplifying the maxim of the old schools that flattery is the food of fools and now and then your men of wit will condescend to take a bit (I mean, they are copying the modus operandi of a paternalistic state to good effect in their own operations).
Mark my words, the present rash of vociferous student protests will come to nothing in terms of upsetting or realigning the status quo. If the university marshals can’t quite quell the riots, the campus police and quasi-military security firms will do the job. At the moment, the defence establishment is adopting a classic tactical- cunctator or delaying approach, all the while muttering under its breath: “Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re.” (Roughly translated, that’s an iron hand in a velvet glove.) Ergo, no mass arrest or brutal crackdowns on ring leaders. Yet. And we won’t even go to that dark corner there, where allegations of conspiratorial managed spectacles with a vested agenda lurk…
The midweek hullaballoo, however, is making gamine academics and armchair critics of the government sit up and take note with (admittedly) milder than usual interest. If January is a month in which we faithfully cry crocodile tears for an assassinated editor and lament over the disappearance of a maverick cartoonist who dared critique a person or persons high and lifted up, it must also be a time when the media industry turns the spotlight on itself. Are we as bearers of a torch worthy to carry that sacred flame in Promethean fashion and, naked, not be ashamed? What are we protesting about, and when was the last time it was not political? Do we have skeletons in our own closets that would make Machiavelli blush?
The new thinking in pseudo media circles is that journalism is the oldest profession. Yes, even older than politics. For while politicians may have created the chaos in the first place, it was the journalists who created the politicians. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? After such a fall, what redemption? |
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