The emperor’s old clothes

Who has courage to tell our PM that money garnered from his cast-off clothes are not what people need.

Pakistan has earned the dubious distinction of having brought to the helm of affairs a leadership which is not just bereft of vision, but also insensitive to the point of being insensible.  It was bad enough that our president absented himself from the country when a deluge of catastrophic dimensions has turned the land inside out and upside down but to top that, if that shameful fiasco can be bested, we have a perpetually perplexed prime minister who declares that he is going to place his well-chosen wardrobe under the auctioneer’s hammer, raising money for those displaced by the worst floods in living memory.

For a man who never seems to wear the same suit twice, that would seem like an immense number of clothes to flog, not counting the ones that he would want to keep in order to maintain his modesty and to avoid being seen with nothing on in the bright glare of daylight, somewhat akin to the emperor who wore nothing when the swindlers who had come to know of his predilection for fine couture dressed him in an imaginary suit which could only be seen by those who were “fit for their office and not stupid”.  When Hans Christian Andersen wrote this fable in 1837, he could not have known of a state that was still over a hundred years from its birth, he could not have known about the arrogance and ignorance of the rulers who were to run that state into the ground, he could not have known about the blood-sucking leeches and swindlers who stole that nation’s wealth with impunity.  But what Mr Andersen did know, and what his tale tells us, is that there comes a point in every ruler’s life when the truth is out, when the lie falls away, baring the ugly, rotten flesh festering beneath the trimmings and trappings of power and ill-begotten wealth.

In Andersen’s nineteenth century fable, it is the innocence of a young child which reveals that, alas, the ruler had no clothes on at all — he was as naked as the day he had been born, and he strutted about like a peacock coifed in silk and gold thread, ignorant of his nakedness. It was the child’s lack of artifice which enabled him to speak up, declaring that the emperor, contrary to what his loyal courtiers had told him, was in the buff, with nary a stitch on his stately bulk.  Only then did the people, the until-then loyal subjects, speak up, echoing the child’s honesty and expressing their horror at the spectacle they beheld.

Who in the Land of the Purely Sycophantic has the courage to tell our dashing prime minister that money garnered from his cast-off clothes are not what the people of our beloved country need?  That despite the centuries of endurance, there comes a time when the truth reveals itself, when the accoutrements of respectability are torn to pieces by an anger which can no longer be contained?  The flood waters have not only washed away the lives of twenty million Pakistanis but the gushing torrents have ripped out the hearts of our people and planted in that gaping cavity the seed of retribution.

Who in our beloved, blighted land shall call the bluff and rip off the shroud which has encased the nation in a cocoon of privation?  Who shall have the determination to point out the ones who were to protect us, who failed us? Who shall call out the names of the ones who have betrayed us, sold us, pushed us to the brink?  And who shall have the ultimate vision to cleanse our land of the pests that devour our rich harvests, the weeds which choke our fallow fields?

Published in The Express Tribune, August 25^th, 2010.