Pigging out on grubby finger-printing
Someone sent me a wonderful line from Nadine Gordimer recently: ‘The
country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an
embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not
exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and
empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby fingerprint of reality upon
the beautiful.’ This is as robust, as-it-is and unpretentious as it can
get when it comes to being honest about a place. It would sober up the
most starry-eyed patriot without offending. All quite healthy, I
believe.
Let’s forget the tourist pamphlet which is after all just another
advertisement; advertisements are not trueconfessions, we all know that.
We can be glad that our country is real, following the Gordimer
characterization. Yes, our reality is a fingerprint that contains enough
grubbiness to take the gloss off the paradise we tell the world that we
are. Of course none of us desire the ants, flies and bad smells, but
there is something appealing in the overall imperfection. It is this
defective nature of things that spurs all of us to do things; we would
die of boredom otherwise.
The notions of the paradisaical tourist pamphlet and reality’s grubby
fingerprint lends well to a reading of our political milieu. The tourist
pamphlet is of course our much talked about democracy. It is also the
comprehensive defeat of the LTTE. It is the fact that despite 500 years
of foreign domination, we’ve kept our identity relatively intact. It is
also our resilience; our ability to take blows and remain standing
(tsunami, floods, droughts, two bloody insurrections and a 30-year war).
The grubby fingerprint pertaining to politics would include the
following: the gap between rhetoric and practice, the flaws in the
institutional structure which make for power abuse and Treasury theft, a
constitution that opens the citizen to all manner of exploitation and
humiliation at the hands of the powerful and corruption at all level and
the fact that we are yet to resettle all the persons displaced
internally courtesy the LTTE. None of these are insufferable.
We know, we live with them and as we do, we still try to wipe away
the grubby marks that intrude on the overall structures of democracy.
There are other examples: the fact that there exist among us
anti-intellectual frauds deliberately and happily engaging in a project
called grubbiness-enhancing; that certain people think that a job is a
reward to be enjoyed and not something related to a job-description, a
contract and terms therein and a work ethic that weighs on the side of a
notion of responsibility rather than right; all this is acceptable
grubbiness.
What is important to understand is how grubby is grubby, i.e. beyond
which point is grubbiness insufferable. A related question would be,
‘are things as “grubby” as some people make them out to be?’
The truth is Sri Lanka has been trashed way out of proportion both
locally and internationally. This is quite ok if trashing was deserved
and was done by men and women with integrity. Unfortunately and
paradoxically the bad-mouthing has been the vocation (yes!) of people
who more than anyone else deserves to be called ‘trash’.
I am thinking of shady characters like Sunanda Deshapriya and his
rag-tag team of dollar-hungry social misfits all paid to throw garbage
around and manufacture a ‘grubby fingerprint’ that is many times larger
than reality. And I am thinking of all those petty thieves and two-bit
politicians masquerading as human rights activists and media rights
advocates who spared no pains to vilify Sri Lanka in international
forums not because of any palpable guilt but that they didn’t like
certain faces (e.g. Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sarath Fonseka, Gotabhaya
Rajapaksa etc).
Their objective was not social clean-up to acceptable levels of
grubbiness mind you. Their project was and is one of obtaining by hook
or by crook regime change. Regime change, let me emphasize, not as a
necessary instrument to ensure that garbage remains at acceptable levels
but to a) to reverse the gains obtained from the comprehensive military
defeat of the LTTE, b) put in power a set of traitors who could be
counted on to act against the national interest and c) getting revenge
from the Government for treating them as the jokers that they are.
We have David Miliband, Bernard Kouchner, Navi Pillai grubbing away
with gay abandon with special interest. King Midas’ touch turned all
things to gold, legend says. People like Hillary Clinton on the other
hand could not help but leave faecal-trace on everything they choose to
touch. That’s gross, I know, but there is politics in this business of
grubbing beyond reasonable levels. That’s how and why the ‘failed state’
notion was orchestrated. That’s probably why there’s a lot of noise
about the EU going to withdraw the GSP Plus concession.
This is not ‘reality-grubbing’ as per the Gordimer observation. This
is fantasy-grubbing. We must not forget, however, that at times such
defacing exercises have serious consequences; the grubbiness can often
stick as per the Goebbelsian approach.
Sure we don’t really need tourist pamphlets and can do with some
grubby-fingerprints but only up to a point. Beyond that, Gordimer would
understand, we really cannot be expected to twiddle our thumbs and let
idiots with nefarious agendas defacate all over us.
Today we do have a ‘real’ country. We also have people trying to
over-dose us with reality. That’s a heck load of grubby fingers; some of
the ‘ok’ kind and some not. There are too many piggeries. Good to be
alert.
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