[IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE CALLED HUMILITY]
The other stuff caught on camera…well, one might say I
slipped, but in the larger slippage context that was nothing. I made a mockery of my rhetoric with those
antics, sure. It was, all things
considered, quite disrespectful and even disgraceful. And yet, it was the eloquence and not the
post-eloquence horsing around that really did me in.
I slipped when I hailed Mandela’s humility. Mandela once said ‘I’m not a saint, unless
you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.’ I slipped when I recalled that he admitted
freely to imperfection.
I slipped when I said that like Martin Luther King he,
Mandela, would give potent voice to the claims of the oppressed and the moral
necessity of racial justice. I slipped
when I threw in Mahatma Gandhi into my script.
I slipped when I recalled that he once said ‘prisoners
cannot enter into contracts.’
I slipped most of all when I said ‘He tells us what’s
possible not just in the pages of dusty history books but in our own lives as
well.’ I made it worse when I said that
Mandela prompts reflection, makes me ask ‘how well have I applied his lessons
to my own life?’ And I painted myself
into a corner by talking about justice, pace, reconciliation, poverty,
inequality etc.
Now it’s all said.
For a while the media will play with that hand-shake and those
selfies. Sooner or later, I will be
asked to put my money where my mouth is.
I mean, I don’t believe a word I say so it would be silly to expect me
to take my own advice. I will do my redemption number only if I am pushed against
the wall.
Everyone knows that I am not a saint and that I am not even
one that keeps trying. I do devilry both at home and abroad. I don’t say I am a saint but neither do I
admit to devilry. No, not even to a teeny weeny impishness. I like the moral high horse and I ride it
because that particular beast is a media construct. Need I say that the new golden rule is that
those who control media make saints as well as devil. I am on the right side. No apologies. Now that I’ve slipped, I guess I’ll have to
be saying ‘sorry’ at every turn.
Oppressed? Justice? I
know how to spell those words. I guess
that won’t be enough now. As for Gandhi,
the man made his mark with ‘non-violence’.
So far I’ve dispensed so much death and destruction that I don’t have
the moral authority even to utter that Indian’s name. Shame.
Prisoners and jailers. I am a prisoner of
circumstances. Rhetoric notwithstanding
my presidential term can be called ‘Same old, same old’. The only difference to the world is that I
varnish my lie better than my predecessors did.
Now I have to apply ‘The Lessons’ to my own life and by
extension, considering that I am President of the USA, to my own country, or
rather its foreign policy. No more
drone attacks. No more phone-tapping. No more capitalism. Damn!
0 comments:
Post a Comment