An unhappy commentary

Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own - Charles de Gaulle

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AFTER the storm comes the calm and after the darkness, the dawn. It is the commonplace maxim about storms and perhaps cyclones.

Calm is not something we will have in the foreseeable future. Dawn will not follow darkness any time soon. Instead, we are promised a convulsively deranged cacophony of recriminatory slanging between the Government and the Opposition. The Opposition has suddenly acquired plenty of wisdom on hydraulic engineering and metrological forecasting.

The sheer buffoonery of a Government parliamentarian attempting to preside over a meeting where the Kandy District Secretary was responding to a group of Opposition politicians is not a reassuring sign of how the cyclone wreckage is to be dealt with.

There were three contenders for the executive presidency. Anura Kumara Dissanayake made it and has inherited the wind. Now, as he himself has said, he must start from zero.

Sajith Premadasa’s glee club may tell you that their man is the most competent to ‘verticalise’ the economy ‘horizontalised’ by Cyclone Ditwah.

The UNP’s Goblin from Galle may tell you that only his leader is fluent in the lingo of the loan sharks of international capital markets.

The tycoon who wants to make us an entrepreneurial state is hell bent on a trajectory of reigniting primitive tribal instincts.

A wise observation by Al Gore, the decent democrat and climate change activist who lost his White House bid to George Bush Jr thanks to a ruling by the US Supreme Court, is an appropriate point of departure for this brief missive.