by A Special Political Commentator in Colombo
Ah, the age-old spectacle returns—nay, gallops—onto the national stage with all the subtlety of an elephant in ballet slippers. Behold! The clowns have seized the scepter, and with it, the entire orchestra of statecraft. Not that they know which end of the scepter to hold, mind you—they simply liked the shininess.
Let us commence our eulogy for Reason with a standing ovation for Folly.
You see, when clowns come to power—and they always do when the populace mistakes laughter for leadership—they mistake the royal dais for a circus ring. Their first decree? Inflate the balloon animals of policy until they burst in spectacular technicolor. Their second? Crown themselves kings of a make-believe dominion where every mirror reflects only magnificence and never the greasepaint of ineptitude.
What these pie-slinging potentates fail to grasp is that a fool with a throne is still a fool—just with better upholstery.
In their desperate attempt to transmogrify into monarchs, they don golden crowns that sit uneasily atop pompadours of delusion. They strut like peacocks on stilts, issuing proclamations that reek of “alternative facts” and the intellectual rigor of a wet sponge. One might say they are busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest—but alas, only at kicking themselves.
The tragedy, of course, is not in the clown’s buffoonery. That’s expected. It’s that a chorus of hollow-headed hillows—those perennially panicked pseudo-schemers of the half-baked mind—continue to prop them up with all the elegance of scaffolding made from uncooked spaghetti. Their loyalty is not to truth or competence, but to the gnarled talon of power, gripped by hook, crook, or very loud tweet.
And let us not forget the peculiar mental gymnastics involved. To support these jesters, one must suspend disbelief like a pair of trousers in a gale. The economy may be floundering like a fish on a bicycle, the justice system might be more bent than a politician’s promise, yet somehow the problem is always “the media,” or “the deep state,” or that one professor who once used the word “nuance.”
These are men (and women, though often relegated to backup tambourine in the Clown Symphony) who couldn’t lead a conga line, let alone a country. Their policies are less “roadmap to the future” and more “treasure map drawn by a toddler with jelly on their fingers.” Yet still they march on, carried aloft by a mob whose average thought velocity makes molasses in January look like a NASA rocket launch.
To paraphrase the old jest: How do you know when a clown is lying? His mouth is moving and the stock market just sneezed.
Let us not pretend that this is new. History is littered with the banana peels of similar regimes, and the world has always had an unhealthy affection for colorful fools with loud voices and empty heads. But we, dear reader, we had hoped we had evolved past electing Punch and Judy into the cabinet.
Apparently not.
So let us buckle in and enjoy this grotesque pantomime. The clowns are in charge, the circus tent is aflame, and the popcorn’s overpriced. The only thing left to do is laugh—loudly, bitterly, and with the full knowledge that the joke, as always, is on us.
