The colourful pageant of our political circus

Bless the voter who still believes that parties represent ideologies, or are irrevocably committed to a single political, social, economic, cultural, or global ethos – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

Which Gen X veteran or Baby Boomer has not at one time or another uttered the phrase: “When we were growing up...”? It usually precedes some trite observation about the blessed assuredness of tradition – although on occasion, some sharp insights are not unknown to the ruminative.

Now, at the time when yours truly was finding his feet in the arena of civics and governance, which is to say at ‘the School by the Sea’ during GRC lessons (or ‘Western Classics’ as old-timers would call it), colours and their combinations were a source of comfort.

We were forever – ‘Esto perpetua!’ – dressed in blue and white while masters drilled the conformity of rational ages into our droid-like minds. And later, the seniority of white alone concealed from us the spectrum of colourfulness beyond our cloned existence; for instance, at ‘international schools’. 

Even beyond the hallowed precincts of College – “YOU are the walls of S. Thomas’” – the only variation on the theme allowed was the pairing of black or grey instead of white socks with our ebony oxfords on more social occasions than our scholarly pursuits could dream of... ah, those were halcyon days indeed!

Today, the sedge is withered in the lake... and no birds sing – except the cacophony of a maddening kaleidoscope of attire and attitudes. It is a time when dashing men about town wear tan loafers with grey suits; or combine dark-brown pumps with a blue blazer, and don’t consider that they’re courting disaster! 

And the couture that is certainly not haute has caught on in slightly less fashionable circles beyond the pale... which is to say, the political circus that has been in town since we shuffled off the straitjacket of western colonialism and donned the loincloth of a peculiarly insular slavery to self-deception.

In the infancy of our political adventure, green was a colour that would not go with anything else... both sartorially and electorally-speaking. The United National Party – though often disunited, not quite national and more a family business than a political enterprise – was a monolith; which, in its heyday at least, did not extend the right hand of fellowship to any electoral tyros, newbies or wannabes.

Of course, more than poor dress sense has eroded the UNP’s outstanding independence since 1948, 1956 and 1977. Body-blows in the great schism of 1991 (no ‘consultation, compromise, consensus’ helped) and the blatant marriage of convenience of 2001-4 (‘cohabitation’) have left the Grand Old Party feeling more than a tad blue... 

It is decades since the GOP was divested of any pretensions of a uni-colour on its main-mast – and the political misadventures of 2005 (SLMC and CWC backing but not TNA), 2010 (‘swanning’ about with the NDF and the General) and 2015 (being yoked with unbelievers who eventually undid the nation) stand testimony to its seeking presidential gold at the end of sundry election rainbows, and finding dung. 

That being said, this is true of virtually all political parties that have had to woo unlikely electoral bedfellows to secure their respective victories at the polls. Except that this time, even the most diehard pachyderm in the herd of jumbo-loving traditionalists may sense in their anxiously vibrating trunks that the Great Ole Pachyderm has gone too far in hitching his mammoth-turned-minnow’s tail to the lamentably rotten bud of a by-now stale lotus. 

Shall I elaborate? Or will you be able to fill in the blank and colour me purple? There is such a thing as restraint, which the Greens – once in their salad days, cold in judgment – seem to have lost in the mad rush... to the melee that is realpolitik-driven government by majority demand irrespective of a more principled praxis.

Can anyone be more colour-blind? Power, greed, lucre have turned Green egos puce... 

On the other hand, this ‘mixing and matching’ is not only trendy but an electoral chic in desperate and divisive times. It is reflective of our splintered polity after the older Rajapaksa’s dismemberment of a once-bipartisan polity, which he engineered during the Great Crossover of January 2007. 

Bless the voter who still believes that parties represent ideologies, or are irrevocably committed to a single political, social, economic, cultural, or global ethos.

In this sense, and given the melting-pot of what passes for multi-partisan legislation, all is fair in realpolitik. If it is inequitable by the polity, let the electorate change colours as mercurially as their traditional bastions of conservative, neoliberal, ‘national’ strongholds have done... fair is fair – no? 

| Editor-at-large of LMD |