Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bastards, beginnings, buttocks, Chinthanaya, damned lies, even more fish, fish, identity, lies, more fish, more lies, patriotism, politics, religion, republic, sri lanka
One morning I woke up and found that I was evil. That all I had stood for was twisted and blackened. All I believed in was unclean, contaminated by a germ that had taken hold while I was asleep. No longer could I feel patriotic, share in the simple pride of a waved flag, of a crisp military parade. Words like honour and independence tasted bitter now. Altogether new synonyms had wormed their way into my mind. Unity meant conformism, discipline meant submission, patriotism was now racism. Pride had become hate, democracy a shapeless beast, terrorism an excuse and freedom meant absolutely fucking nothing.
But last night, I was an innocent. I knew but did not fear the “Patriotism” that was Shaw’s “… last refuge of the scoundrel”; for what is society with no shared purpose, with no pride, no symbols to rally around? Would it even endure? So I had sought out that which was clean and honourable and euphoric, what I could stand up tall and salute. There was a simple pleasure of the skybound firework on the day of Independence: its rushed journey heavenwards calling me to the giddy heights of citizenship in this great enterprise of this country. I grew to love the clean detergent smell of wearing my national dress, the raising of a flag so ornate and symbolic that other’s tri-colour flags seemed so stark, dry and childlike. I honoured the pioneers who had not long ago secured our independence from the clenched fist of colonial strength.
Then, last night, delirious fevered dreams flashed vivid technicolour corruptions of what was simple, beautiful and pure. I dreamt of a State that disenfranchised its own citizens with a single act of parliament. Of academics and the educated, who should know better, incite violence against those who had been my brothers before I slept. Of laws to punish a religion growing, of an Oxbridge educated elite spewing Sinhala Only. As the fever took hold, I saw hundreds of citizens horded into buses and driven into empty spaces. There were flashes of children severed by shells that we calculated to be an acceptable cost of political convenience. I mutely screamed at an electoral majority that could not see any other solution but War. And all the time, I saw hate, spilling like bile, mixed with spittle, running down the jowls of the politicians, gathering on the chins of bestial men and women who in their bloodlust cornered and attacked all that was different, alien and ‘para’ –‘other’.
And at that point, my weakest moment, the microbic invader struck, confusing me. In this confounded state it showed me that we had become the Nietzschean evil we set out to destroy, that our souls were tainted and it told me that the articles which I had shaken my head at before were true, we were monsters, the LTTE and I, two sides of the same coin. That morally, this nation and all we tried to preserve was exactly the same as a group of people who strapped bombs to themselves and blew up innocents.
In my shame, reader, I believed this all. I hated myself. I read comments, op-eds, and even the hysterical messages of trolls who painted my red door black. Shrill voices screamed out how we were no better than that which sought to destroy us. As the infection multiplied, as the moral lethargy replaced the will to act and cycles of cynicism and withdrawal lowered my expectations further till all I could do was tiptoe past my bruised conscience and better sense. I almost succumbed that night to the fever that gripped me ever harder, a final mocking image locked in my mind of hundreds of my brothers and sisters lined up for busses with no destination as men with grey faces and grey guns looked on.
Just like that, the image flickered and I remembered how the story actually ended that day: A single citizen filing a fundamental rights petition against the forced eviction. I felt the ground tremble as the judiciary like a waking giant, reached swiftly to stop and reverse the executive action, holding it unconstitutional. And there alone, in the calm at the eye of the cyclone, I saw clearly what ideal was left to us, what it is we were fighting for, why were different from the monsters we confronted. It never mattered how stupid, base or corrupt the people and their elected officials were, we are still a Republic, we are a representative democracy, we have institutions, a separation of powers and checks and balances. We have a constitution which is a covenant between every citizen and the state. We are greater than the sum of our parts. No matter how often the law is bent, broken or bought it will always be there, if nothing else but as a sullen reminder, and we will know it is wrong and it cannot be got rid of. No matter how many votes are stolen, coerced or rigged, every so many years every leader must endure the risk of being cast out. It will not matter how many journalists are silenced, the media can only be reined, never retired. A state of emergency that has lasted some of us, our whole lives and successively more brutal governments have not been able to completely do away with the freedoms that is the promise of our noble enterprise. The glass may only be half empty, but, damn it, there is a GLASS. It can always be filled. Are we appalled by a state sunk in debate, argument and compromise? Celebrate this. We talk, because we know the alternatives. We know their price.
There is NO comparison between this Republic which we are equal citizens of and a systemically violent, fascist personality cult. If I need something to hang on to, I will hang onto this. I don’t need to expect the best motivations of the leaders to ensure that my freedoms will survive. It will, battered and bruised, because that’s what it is built to do in a democracy.
I see now that we’ve quite missed the point by celebrating our independence. There is so little to gain recounting our release from an imperial rule, when you consider that the single most significant event that took place that day was the birth of the republic. The beginning of the hard work of building a nation. The metaphorical inking of the eternal contract between the state and all its citizens, even those yet unborn. This day something wonderful was birthed, a people with the mandate and opportunity to create their own destiny, to govern themselves, a prize that so many are denied elsewhere. As much as we’ve squandered it and made ourselves unworthy of it, it still there, silent, resourceful enough to swiftly counter even an act Executive excess and only needing a single citizen to call it into action. And that is what we need to do, we need to USE IT. To build on it. THIS is the ideology worth fighting for, THIS is worth standing up for. This is my pride. I have found myself to be an Idealist and I am NOT ashamed.
The fever is gone. I’m going to put up that flag now.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bastards, belief, buttocks, escaped gorillas, even more fish, fish, god, kuhn, lies, more lies, philosophy, popper, religion
Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φ, οβʊμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λεύθερος.
‘I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.’ – Inscription on the tombstone of Nikos Kazantzakis
Prelude
You presumably believe in something. It is possible that we differ in these beliefs. While the particular question of whether you are right or I am wrong is clearly not getting a conclusive or persuasive answer in a hurry, it makes sense to, you know, understand the nature of our differences and perhaps where our conflict if at all, may lie. A highway code if you will. Learning the signs and the basic flow could help us, both, avoid painful collisions and looking like right idiots.
A confession first. As far as I am aware of, atheists are not syndicated. It is likely that this manifesto would only apply to a few of us.
Some of us are agnostic. Boom. Boom.
Guess what, it seems these questions of deities, afterlives, creation, are a little tricky. And we have to put our hands up and go: you know what, I have no clue how to prove there isn’t a god. It looks like this one will go to the judges. But hey, for everyday purposes, I’m going to stick to the premise that there isn’t one. It makes sense to me; and you know, should overwhelming evidence present itself to the contrary, I would be more than glad to re-evaluate my position. Your contribution here is minimal unless you can produce that evidence. And please, please don’t hand me a piece of your scripture or even WORSE, some damned leaflet written by a complete yokel for whom ‘Bible Belt’ is both a home town AND what they keep their trousers tied up with.
Some of us are not un-examined lives.
70 percent of my class inherited daddy’s faith along with the used car business and the mysogeny. Eating chalk between classes, demonstrating sheep-like cognitive functions and an otherwise complete lack of personality kept them off the radar of the more vicious and punitively inventive of our teachers.
A few of us were getting into trouble with Jesuit priests for asking them what existentialism meant. And for arguing the question that was the hairline fracture that lead to the final schism from the beliefs of my fathers: ‘Why is faith needed for redemption? Isn’t my Buddhist friend, who leads a good life as deserving of the embrace of a just God?’
The chief questions that troubled my gangly colleagues at this time was: ‘does it show that I am a compulsive masturbator?’ and ‘how long is it before the blindness/anemia sets in?’
Soon after, as my friends embarked on a voyage of self discovery with the opposite sex, their genitals and extra strong beer, some of us weren’t that hot with the ladies. So we read. Of Descartes’ failed attempt to prove the existence of a God in Meditations of First Philosophy; of Heller rail against a God in a world gone mad in Catch-22; of Satre’s protagonist secure an abortion for his mistress… no doubt still smoking Gauloise and looking cool.
We also debated. Entire coffee and tobacco harvests have been laid waste in our earnest late night discussions, musings and dialogues. Were searched for Gods, Justice, Goodness, Values, and mostly Truth. We spoke with the smartest people we could find, with the disinterested and zealous; with the godless and devout; priests and madmen. And now, here, our choices and ideas are not those of the unexamined or unquestioned mind. Nor are we afraid of our ideas being picked apart or questioned. We are the product of our journey and our ideas have developed and changed as a function of it.
So if you want to be the next leg in my explorative journey, do better than a patronizing smile and a ‘why don’t you want to read my leaflet?’. Otherwise, my guess is that you discovered religion late, right after you gave up the compulsive chalk eating; probably though your personal difficulties or the fear of mortality, loss or isolation and think the rest of us are late starters too. If I’m refusing to engage you, it’s because frankly, I think you are going to waste my time. I’m really OK with you calling this arrogance. Which it isn’t; but frankly, your premise that I am a blank book, unexamined and intellectually inert, is.
We don’t think all of you are stupid. Just some.
No. Honestly. We do not think you credulous or stupid by virtue of your beliefs alone. Unless you are a Scientologist or Mormon. There’s really no way I can broaden my definition of beliefto include people who believe what they read in paperback sci-fi. That’s not a belief. That’s a condition. Like the guy who fell on his head and now thinks he’s a tomato.
Nevertheless and notwithstanding, the intelligent and accomplished have had unshakable faith in the divine. It is possible that individuals who commanded respect and awe, or others who thought, said and did the fantastic, would have not evaluated their beliefs; that they would have accepted the faith of their fathers without choice or analysis. But we would find this uncharacteristic and irreconcilable with our idea of them. Your belief is neither offensive nor laughable to me. Really. Here’s me not laughing at Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Science is not God.
Philosophers have a really tough time with the Scientific Method. Thomas Kuhn argued convincingly in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science was not a linear process of the accumulation of knowledge, rather a set of crises which forced ‘paradigm shifts’. Suddenly, the scientific method was full of dispute and speculation. It wasn’t the simple, incremental, rigorous, unbiased process it was purported to be.
Meanwhile, we had lots of trouble with crows. Karl Popper took induction apart, the logical basis of observation, leaving no logical argument in favor of it but that it works till it doesn’t.Inductive logic, which says that having observed black crows all our lives, we expect the next crow we see to be black is as unjustified as the counterintuitive process saying ‘well the next one must not be black.’
So if you think that you’re on to something by exploiting your perceived difference between a ‘law’ and a ‘theory’ as your masterstroke against Natural Selection, well guess what, ALL OF SCIENCE is THEORY. And none of it, say the philosopher, is truth.
We have beliefs and values.
That bridge I’m about to drive over? Is it going to crumble while I’m on it? Did I know the man who built it? Designed it? Do I trust the physics to hold up? The materials? You know what, the guy in front just made it across. What the hell. Guess I will too. We believe in things, both spiritual and not. Your assumption that my mind is an anarchic wasteland, where I believe in nothing but what I have evidenced, is wrong. We have belief structures. In fact for some, the non existence of a god is a premise we accept without rigorous proof, i.e. a belief.
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“How important is it for a candidate to have STRONG religious beliefs, regardless of whether those beliefs are the same as yours? Is it very important, somewhat important, not very important, or not at all important?” CBS News Poll. June 26-28, 2007 |
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. |
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Very |
Somewhat |
Not Very |
Not at All |
Unsure |
||
|
% |
% |
% |
% |
% |
||
|
ALL reg. voters |
27 |
36 |
16 |
20 |
1 |
|
|
Republicans |
43 |
35 |
12 |
7 |
3 |
|
|
Democrats |
23 |
35 |
19 |
23 |
0 |
|
|
Independents |
20 |
36 |
17 |
27 |
0 |
|
In the great Democrat litmus test recently Senators Obama and Clinton showed that both a Woman and Black was conceivable and realistic as a choice of the American people’s Chief Executive. But polling numbers above have ruled out a non-religious President of the United States. It’s not surprising therefore that ‘Shares our Values’ is a consistent and accurate measure of a voter’s personal preference for a candidate.
Despite the popular idea that values must be religious, I ask you, is it hard to imagine that atheists have values and make conscious choices to live by them? That our values should differ, like our belief structures do is expected, but that they stem from choice, experience and commonsense is so hard to imagine?
In the end, I must admit my personal search for the divine was spurred by my firmness for the very values i am suspected of not having. Having my question above on the necessity of faith for salvation answered in a manner I saw as unjust, I made a decision:
I rather be in a hell with friends I knew to be wonderful, warm, exemplary people than in a heaven in the shadow of an arbitrary and unfair god.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bastards, buttocks, choices, colombo, even more fish, fear, fish, lard, more fish, risk, sri lanka, war
Rajiv joins us a few minutes late for dinner; having come straight from work. He slides into his chair quickly, crisply dressed despite the the humidity that has me sweating into my shirt. In the still night, the long fingered zephyrs turn the occassional flower this way and that, like a parent’s hand as it maneuvers a child’s face checking for dirt. At the table, conversations carry both opportunity and loss. Rajiv speaks of bad business conditions in his quiet voice precisely, without hyperbole, exaggeration or rant. In the same voice he ordered the salmon with. As he put it gently to me, “I don’t eat any meat.”
“So many are leaving,” he tells me; ”I am one of four, no, five from our class who are still in Sri Lanka. There were 48 of us.”
The salmon, exquisite in its coconut milk, served with cous-cous occupies us for a while. Rajiv picks at it unhurriedly and explains: “People leave because of the security situation”
I interrupt him. ”I think it’s more that our savings our worthless; there is no future we can prepare for, with 30% inflation.”
“No. It isn’t the lifestyle, the economic condition, people are now leaving simply out of fear.”
I listen politely.
“My wife used to work; we commuted together in our car. The kids would hear about a bomb in Colombo. They are young and would worry till we would come back home. Eventually we thought about that, how my wife and I would go to work together and come back together. If something happened while on the road, we’d both be there.” He looked at me sadly. “We agreed that at least she should stop work.”
I stare down at my plate; all I hear is the the unconcerned croaking of frogs.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: buttocks, debt, fish, hicks, house, lard, villagers, yokels
Originally uploaded by harean
Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, your average Aasvogel is not a completely socially backward bird. While Finches are gregarious and Bulbuls vain, the Aasvogel is often spotted wearing shorts so obviously synthetic, so hideously floral, that the original flowers depicted could possibly not occur in nature. Unless Mother Nature has to throw up now and then. Even bees, insects so depraved that they fiddle with plant genitals all day must have STANDARDS.
In my defence I can only offer this argument: I love the shorts in question. I am irreversibly, unconditionally and unabashedly besotted by this luminescent blue-green pair shorts. Our love is special. These shorts have been with me through it all, from snorkeling off Unawatuna to watching a young Alan Strang have lots of horsey related orgasms in the recent production of Equus. (Divert. Equus. Rocked. Muchly.) It has successfully contained my ass despite my recently widening proportions, and if it’s going to keep the faith, I’d sooner go naked than be one to give up on it.
On some matters however, the Aasvogel is more discerning. Sophisticated like. Like when I decided to sacrifice the lion’s share of my projected earning capacity for the NEXT DECADE to build a house. Much has to be said about this house. How it was transformed from something the previous owners ran away from barely resisting the urge to set fire to their sandals as they dusted it at the gate to something I that I now retreat to with joy in my self inflicted poverty.
But that which should be said about the building of the same house would at some stage involve a lengthy inquisition into the maternal pedigree of the whoop of gorillas who escaped from Zimbabwe to pose as my builders. Of how I cheerfully paid these charlatans large amounts of money I will not earn in the future, to cause me material harm and mental anguish. Of how my bankers have decided that since now that I am their bitch after all, they can make crank phone calls to me. To tell me that my last payment didn’t go through, and how they would be send someone to chop off my goolies, throw it into my house and set fire to it all, if it wasn’t against the BASEL II banking reform regulations. Refer the debt/liquidity chart above for more details. I also added to my vocabulary the more technically challenging sweary words I have not used hitherto. Swearing, it turns out, is like fucking. Motivation is nothing. Technique is everything.
But house was built, builders were strategically shaved and no one could hardly tell the difference in the end. After the poo was washed off the walls, that is. Which left me to manage the last hurdle as it were. That I now lived in what could only be charitably called: the provinces. The first sign was that my address is both unpronounceable as well as mildly embarrassing. It doesn’t trip off the tongue lightly as much it tries to knot it with your tonsils. Then came the time I met someone while swimming off Galle and introduced myself with my still new address. The response was not what I expected. “Ah I’m from Angoda too!” one chirped while his friend sniggered. SNIGGERED, THE BASTARD. Oh God, I wasn’t even living there yet.
My neighbourhood is a… village. It may be a village 20 minutes from Borella with all the modern day conveniences and vices, but it’s got fully grown men lounging about the local tea shop at 11am on a Monday morning, people who keep their freaking doors open all the damn time and the local criminal dogsbody currently in the payroll of a failed Provincial Council politician’s son down the road. The casual fearlessness of people you meet on the road, who’ll look you in the eye and kill you if you speak funny. And that’s just the women.
As with every rural setting there are a number of roles that I was thrilled to find filled. I’ve noted Local Harmless Addict #1. I’ve never met #2. Leading me to the conclusion that the local economy can only support one drug addict. I’ve been approached by Useless Male Proto-Patriarch who’s been delegated minor gossiping and the spreading of small rumours. Then we have The Neighbour Who Keeps Asking for Stuff. I was glad to know they existed long before I even moved in. But something niggled at me for a while, a shoe, perhaps a rural bathroom slipper so to speak, that had not dropped. I was waiting for something. Heaven knew what.
The great nesting process was relatively painless although physically draining. Got. My. Shit. Barely. Together. Success! I had achieved a crappy milestone in middle class mediocrity; I had more debt than I had cash generating assets. Who cares? I lit candles, mopped the cut cement floor. Waited for the friends of the Aasvogel.
Much later, as we allowed a single well toned guitar and the acoustics of the front terrace to transport us, I heard it. As did all my guests. Down the road, a slurred commentary was offered at high decibels asserting that a certain lady was of ill repute. And that he doing the asserting would show she with the reputation, a thing or two, if he could only manage the complex motor skills involved. And profanity, sweet profanity breaking the now otherwise silent night. Even the crickets were listening for the juicier words. I leaned back, relieved. I had found my Local Drunk and Abusive Husband.
