Cookie crumbles
ONE did not know how, but there was a feeling in the throes of the Berlin Wall’s fall and the right’s celebration of the Soviet Union’s demise that the failure of the capitalism-democracy combine was also a matter of time.
The mother of democracies throws up leaders whose shenanigans range from throwing parties during Covid lockdowns to more carnal fraternity rituals involving a dead pig’s head and parts of the human anatomy. Had the head been alive, the British could have been spared another embarrassing occupant of 10 Downing Street. The Americans elected Donald Trump twice. One is again not sure if, in doing so, they thumbed their noses at the rest of the world or cut their national olfactory to spite their face.
South Korea, that model neighbour of the ‘insane’ militaristic North, has just had an episode that is as tragic as it is comic. Who could have thought that the country, which has until recently been known more for its global takeover through the soft, cultural power of its teledramas and whose business conglomerates are famous for making everything ‘From Chips to Ships’, would have a botched martial law attempt? It can only be a relief that it did not succeed, but what has transpired in its wake makes one question whether it was the lack of ‘preparedness’ by the military, as it told parliament, or more profound convictions about democracy.
Many generations of Pakistanis have been amused by the legend that South Korea learned from our Five-Year Plans in the 1960s to become an Asian Tiger within a generation or two. True or not, maybe it is time for some cross-pollination. The South Korean military refused to usurp people’s right to govern themselves through their elected representatives. In fact, soldiers could be seen getting their heads shaved outside their GHQ in Seoul in protest against the president’s move to impose martial law.
Art imitates life and vice versa, but life also imitates life.
The French have deposed their prime minister through a vote of no-confidence, an entirely constitutional and democratic move. However, the fact that the far-right Marine Le Pen threw her party’s weight behind the motion leaves no doubt about the fate of liberal, progressive, pro-immigration, and inclusive policies in the Fifth Republic. One wonders how Derrida and Foucault, French intellectuals with ties to North Africa, the region most represented among the immigrants, would read the situation.
Returning to the leader of the ‘free world,’ it has not only re-elected a self-professed misogynist, a draft and tax evader, but it seems to be almost celebrating the murder of one of the largest health insurance companies’ CEO in broad daylight in New York. Not only did no witnesses come forward immediately, but, reportedly, the company’s post announcing his murder provoked 70,000 happy-face reactions. The assassin, identified and charged, left behind bullet casings engraved with ‘delay’ and ‘deny’, referring to the private health service system’s tactics of denying its ‘customers’ the care and services they have already paid for through insurance premiums. Public health services, like the UK’s NHS, are also notorious for being inefficient. Our own PIA found no takers when it was put up for divestment.
India, the largest democracy in the world, is experiencing the worst communal and religious fissures since independence. The outgoing chief justice of the supreme court cited divine guidance in the Babri Mosque verdict. The ruling party is embroiled in allegations of extraterritorial and extra-judicial means of silencing dissenters from Canada to the US. State elections revolve around claims and counterclaims that one religion’s place of worhip bears the palimpsest of another.
Many in my generation were hooked on the James Hadley Chase novels; as much for their risqué covers as for their cloak-and-dagger plots. I am sure The Way the Cookie Crumbles has stuck in the memory because it had to do with a heist in broad daylight, something practised in the name of governance by ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ regimes alike.
Art imitates life and vice versa, but life also imitates life, as tragedy and farce, not necessarily in that order. Who knows what the perpetrators of the May 9 mayhem in Pakistan were led to believe? Maybe they expected a Syrian army-like acquiescence in the face of an onslaught on state institutions. The most heard refrain in drawing room chatter is that the ‘forces have prevented Pakistan from becoming another Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon’. We don’t know if it is just the martial laws and experimentation with hybrid regimes that have prevented the country from becoming an Asian Tiger; but these have prevented Pakistan from becoming what it could have been.
Dec 16 is upon us; the cookie continues to crumble.
The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.
Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2024
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