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| Sunday, 4 August 2002 |
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Sel Lipi : The Trend Setter A decade ago, whilst campaigning for election as President, Bill Clinton said that, under the then President George Bush, the United States of America was in danger of becoming something like Sri Lanka (or words to that effect). This statement followed a trend, set nearly half a century before by a homesick humourist, who said that 'Colombo is half the size of New York Cemetery and twice as dead'. This tendency, of making out that this island is just one step up from the civilisation of the Orang Utang, was continued by cartoonists like Gary Trudeau (whose be-turbanned 'Sri Lankan' doctor said that there was no tradition of anaesthesia in Sri Lanka). After all, the eponymous heroine of the cartoon strip 'Brenda Starr, Reporter' preferred going on a Mississippi steamboat to investigate some minor scam or other to reporting on the situation in this country. This grim view of our little nation was reinforced by the widely broadcast scenes of our civil war, which became almost synonymous with the name 'Sri Lanka'. American journalists echoed the words of Bishop Heber's hymn in writing their accounts of the conflict. And, of course, the prolonged power cuts which plagued our households may have given some justification to those Americans who believed that we were living in the Dark Ages. After all, it was a bit difficult for us to claim, by candlelight, that we were on the verge of becoming a Newly Industrialised Country. We seemed to make a poor comparison indeed with the World's Only Superpower. However, nemesis seems duly to have followed hubris in the case of these Americans. The attack on the Twin Towers proved that targets in the USA were as prone to terrorist attacks as the Central Bank of Sri Lanka or Katunayake Airport. And Clinton's prognostications on the father seem to have come true in the case of the son: under George 'Dubya' Bush the US economic colossus appears to have developed feet of a clayey consistency. And now it seems that the Dark Ages are imminent, not in Sri Lanka but in the USA. The lack of forward planning on the part of power planners has meant that there have been long power-cuts in New England; power-cuts are expected in New York as power-generation facilities fail to keep up with the demands of air-conditioning over this extra-warm summer. Householders are being forced to go out looking for candles (of the luminous, not the votive variety, although the latter may also be soon in demand). Extra generators are being planned as stand-ins. Does any of this sound familiar? So the question raises itself: is Sri Lanka a trendsetter as far as the USA is concerned? Does our immediate past represent the way that America is going? Is Gary Trudeau in fact an unsuspecting latter day futurist? And is Bill Clinton a prophet in spite of himself? - Gotabhaya |
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