Untitled Document

Political Sketchbook

The three stages of a man as written by Lankan experts

by Rajpal Abeyanayake
We all entertain a fascination for movies in which aliens inhabit the earth and pretend that they are fascinated by our species. HBO a channel that is not seen by most of us had a movie of that sort last week.

The alien there looked a bit like - how appropriate -- like SB Dissanayake. Not only was he round as a spaceship, he also had a way of being amused like a child at things which adult earthlings are rarely amused about.

The alien in the movies is amused by eating -- yes, just plain eating, apparently because the inhabitants of the planet that he comes from do not eat. So every time somebody eats, this alien cracks up and laughs uncontrollably.

Likewise, SB Dissanayake laughs every time he sees dirty politics. It is for the opposite reason that the alien in the movie laughs when he sees people eating though. SB Dissanayake has seen and done so much dirty politics that to him there is nothing that is serious or dirty about it. He laughs, because he sees that other people are so shocked sometimes by seeing such dirty politics, and that amuses him, because to him being shocked by dirty politics is like being shocked by something commonplace like people ageing or children growing up or the President coming late.

The other day SB Dissanayake laughed and chuckled and almost upchucked, saying that ' we would have been mad to get rid of the Presidency in the early days of the PA government.'' This despite the fact that the early PA government had given a promise that the Presidency will be dismantled as soon as the PA wins the election.

SB Dissanayake was being amused and doing his ‘I am so tickled’number with his voice almost getting lost in the process, even though the subject under discussion was something like political accountability in Sri Lanka. But SB Dissanayake is like the alien who is amused by people eating. There is nothing serious about accountability for him. It is as if he was never able to distinguish childhood between a wedding and a funeral, and it stayed that way with him forever, with his little Tommy Tucker kind of nursery rhyme expression fixed in the rotundity of his face.

But when he talks about the old PA days, SB Dissanayake and Mahinda Wijesekera and the whole lot cut a picture. SB Dissanayake was almost feeling nostalgic about the old PA days, when he really belonged to a club of bad boys.

All the fathers of bad boys came from the PA, for instance, and Mahen Ratwatte and even SB jnr., would be old enough to remember that their fathers were the ultimate creations of the PA government under dear old aunty Chandrika -- and that they themselves therefore are the creations of the People's Alliance and the Chandrika era.
The Centre for Productive Alternatives or some such should do a survey to find out exactly why all fathers of errant political progeny trace their roots to the People's Alliance and not to the UNF which is the party of thugs or so it is said. SB Dissanayake is so seemingly jaded looking these days that he is like the man who thinks that he has come to the end of his life, because he has been doine everything that had to be done. Now, Disssnayake and Wijesekera should together bring out the book and commission Lester James Peiris to do the movie. Like Gamperaliya Yuganthaya and that trilogy, this will be in three stages.

First student politics JVP or firebreathing times as a leftist. Then move centre stage, join the People's Alliance progressive party, and bring up two sons in this process. But to really self actualize life, join the UNF, where you have to ultimately go in order to arrive. But don't forget to take your sons with you - and if you do not get them into a fight while you are there, you ain't no father.

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