Month: July 2022

Posted on

First men in the moon

 

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

 

One of the depressing things about being in your (later) middle years is that the people who were your heroes in your youth start to die with an alarming frequency.  Yes, they’ve become old and this is to be expected, but it’s still depressing.  This month has seen the departures of Alan Grant, the Scottish comic-book writer whose career took him from DC Thomson in Dundee to DC Comics in America, and who played a big role in shaping Judge Dredd, the signature character and strip of 2000AD, my favourite comic, as well as writing stories for Strontium Dog, Robo–Hunter and Batman; of the actor L.Q. Jones, who was best known for appearing in American western movies and TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s and was one of the very last, recognisable ‘cowboy actors’ still alive; and of the wonderful English character-actor David Warner, about whom I wrote this blog-entry on his 80th birthday last year.  By a sad coincidence, Jones and Warner were also the final survivors of the repertoire who worked with director Sam Peckinpah in a string of classic movies.

 

And July 2022 saw the death of director Bob Rafelson, whose credits include Head (1968), Five Easy Pieces (1971) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981).  By way of a tribute, here’s a slightly updated piece I wrote eight years ago about a Rafelson movie that, I felt, had unfairly disappeared under the radar – 1990’s Mountains of the Moon. 

 

Some of you may be old enough to remember the heyday of Ladybird Books, a company that published children’s books emphasising the educational, the wholesome and the patriotic.  The library at my primary school was stuffed full of them.  Their historical tomes were given special prominence on the shelves.  These dealt with famous figures in British history like Admiral Nelson, Captain Cook, Florence Nightingale and David Livingstone and painted glowing and sanitised portraits of them.

 

These historical characters, according to Ladybird, were fine, upstanding and virtuous, qualities that British people had traditionally prided themselves on having.  Also, the establishment they represented, back in the days of British imperialism and the British Empire, was by extension a fine, upstanding and virtuous thing too.  Needless to say, Ladybird Books didn’t trouble the minds of its young readers with such topics as Admiral Nelson’s dalliance with Mrs Emma Hamilton, or Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer’s orchestration of the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, or indeed Winston Churchill’s opinions of Afghans, the ‘feeble-minded’, women, Jews, Trade Unionists, the Irish, Indians and using chemical weapons.

 

And yet… I can understand anyone, at a young age, being enthusiastic about the damned things.  In my childhood, I loved the Ladybird history books because they served up two things that were vital for a kid: heroes and adventures.  Never mind the fact that they overlooked the moral complexities of character and the moral ambiguities of history.  It was simply, viscerally exciting to read about people who were, supposedly, both incredibly decent and incredibly brave, setting off to perform feats of derring-do in a world that, a couple of centuries ago, seemed full of danger and mystery.

 

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

 

This brings me in a roundabout way to Mountains of the Moon, the Bob Rafelson-directed movie from 1990, which tells the story of Victorian explorers Richard Burton and John Speke and their 1857 expedition to find the source of the River Nile.  I suspect the reason I like this film so much is because it lets me have my cake and eat it.  On one hand, it offers a tale of British historical adventure that’s as thrilling as anything in the old Ladybird Books.  On the other hand, it’s critical of the British Empire and the people who ran it.  You can enjoy the exploits of the two protagonists as they battle their way past peril after peril but, simultaneously, you don’t have to feel guilty for doing so.

 

Mind you, I don’t ever remember seeing a Ladybird volume dedicated to Sir Richard Francis Burton, despite the fact that Burton, as his Wikipedia entry puts it, was a ‘geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, Egyptologist and diplomat’ and spoke 29 languages, including Icelandic, Swahili, Amharic, Sanskrit and Hebrew.  The lack of a Ladybird biography on Burton may be down to Burton’s fascination with the sexual practices of the many cultures he visited, which ‘led him to take measurements of the lengths of the sexual organs of male inhabitants of various regions which he included in his travel books’; or to the rumour that during his military career he once went ‘undercover to investigate a male brothel reputed to be frequented by British soldiers’.  Less salaciously, Burton was simply a loose cannon.  His unruly reputation prevented him from being promoted to the very heights of the British establishment, either as a soldier or as a diplomat.

 

In the Mountains of the Moon, Burton is played by Irish actor Patrick Bergin.  From the movie’s opening scenes – when we see Burton have a spear thrust his mouth by some natives in Somalia, a mishap that’d deter most other people from ever wanting to set foot beyond their front gate again, but with Burton seems only to enflame his passion further for travel and exploration – Bergin does a good job of capturing the man’s versatility, unpredictability and boundless energy.  Indeed, if there’s one thing the film conveys beautifully, it’s the glorious insanity that propels Burton and Speke into the unknown, determined to make sense of it; whilst enduring hardships, indignities and degradations a million miles removed from the cosy, cloistered lives they led in upper-class Victorian Britain.  During the 1857 expedition, Speke – who in Mountains of the Moon is played by Iain Glen – is almost driven mad by beetles crawling into his ears while Burton becomes crippled, his legs swelling up to the point where they need to be lanced.  Come to think of it, the Ladybird books kept clear of stuff like this too.

 

While the film celebrates the two men’s heroism – and heroic powers of endurance – it disdains a British imperial establishment that’s supportive of them because it hopes to enjoy the prestige of their achievements; but that’s also manipulative and untrustworthy.  It’s a historical fact that by the early 1860s Burton and Speke had fallen out, due to a claim by Speke that the source of the Nile lay in Lake Victoria.  This was something that the British press of the time was only too happy to believe and it led to Speke being feted and celebrated.  Meanwhile, Burton’s role in the 1857 expedition was played down.

 

Mountains of the Moon would have you believe that one reason for this was Burton’s Irishness.  His father was of Anglo-Irish stock, though Burton himself was born in Devon.  Here, with Bergin in the role and displaying a recognisable Celtic brogue, Burton seems more Irish than he probably was in real-life.  Speke on the other hand was an English gentleman of the stiff-upper-lip variety, whom the establishment found more palatable to sell as a hero of the Empire.  Actually, it’s a bit ironic that actor Iain Glen is a Scotsman, from Edinburgh.

 

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

 

The feud between the two explorers came to a sudden and unexpected end in September 1864, one day before Burton and Speke were scheduled to debate the Nile’s source at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.  Hunting on a relative’s estate, Speke was killed when his gun discharged itself into him while he was climbing over a wall.  This caused speculation that the controversy that’d soured things so badly between him and his old comrade had led Speke to kill himself, although a jury later ruled that it’d been an accident.  Mountains of the Moon remains ambiguous about Speke’s death, but the door is left open for the possibility that, upset about how the establishment had set him and Burton at each other’s throats, Speke committed suicide.

 

Also indicative of British attitudes at the time is the neglect shown to the African guide Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who in Mountains of the Moon is engagingly played by the Kenyan actor Paul Onsongo.  He proved invaluable to Burton and Speke, and later served with Henry Morton Stanley, and crossed Africa from east to west in 1873, and became the British Empire’s most travelled citizen in Africa.  Eventually, he clocked up some 9600 kilometres, most of it covered on foot.  Despite this, we learn in a postscript that nobody ever thought of inviting Bombay to Britain, presumably because of his lowly ‘native’ status.

 

The rest of the cast is good too.  The distinguished theatrical actress Fiona Shaw turns in a lovely performance as Isabel Burton, the woman who manages to capture the rumbustious Burton’s heart.  She doesn’t, though, capture it to the point where he stops voyaging off to the back of beyond for years on end.  As Speke’s publisher, Richard E. Grant gives a performance of superciliousness that only Grant himself seems capable of.  And Bernard Hill sneaks in an endearing late-minute cameo as Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone, who gets involved in a somewhat homoerotic duel with Burton.  Desperate to impress each other, both men strip off to compare their Africa-acquired scars.

 

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

 

In retrospect, the only things that are regrettable about Mountains of the Moon are: (1) how overlooked the film is; and (2) how low-key Patrick Bergin’s film career has been since.  Regarding the second point, although he made a stir as Julia Roberts’ psychotic husband in 1991’s popular but not-very-good Sleeping with the Enemy, Bergin’s fortunes took a tumble with a couple of unfortunate film choices afterwards.  His performance as Robin Hood in the 1991 movie of the same name was buried by the success of the same year’s bigger, brasher, sillier, Kevin Costner-starring, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Meanwhile he was unlucky enough to play a villain in 1992’s ignorant Tom Clancy / IRA thriller Patriot Games, or as it was known in Ireland, Patronising Games.

 

I suspect these days Bergin derives more pleasure from his music.  He has a band called Patrick Bergin and the Spirit Merchants and they’ve made the Irish top ten.  That said, a few years ago, I was delighted to see him turn up in Ben Wheatley’s tongue-in-cheek gangster / terrorist bloodbath Free Fire (2016).

 

As for the commercial failure of Mountains of the Moon, it certainly didn’t help that its production company (Carolco Pictures) was in the process of going bankrupt at the time and its distributor (Tri-Star) was more interested in promoting another historical drama, Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989), which it’d produced itself.  Neither did the film’s lack of bankable ‘big-name’ stars help its fortunes.  But the way the film has been critically neglected is  harder to fathom.  Maybe it had the bad luck to appear at a time when imperial-era British costume epics of the David Lean / James Ivory school were starting to out of fashion, although Mountains of the Moon certainly doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with such staid fare as Chariots of Fire (1982) or A Room with a View (1985).

 

Director Bob Rafelson, alas, has just passed away and the titles that’ll likely be inscribed on his tombstone are of his earlier films, like 1972’s Five Easy Pieces or 1981’s The Postman Always Rings Twice or even Head, that trippy 1968 epic featuring the Monkees.  But at least Rafelson himself recognised the quality of his lost 1990 classic.  “(W)hen people ask me, ‘If you were to come to our country and we will give you some kind of an homage, what movie would you want to show?’” he once told an interviewer, “…I always say, ‘Top of the list is Mountains of the Moon.’”

 

From imdb.com / © Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

Posted on

The brothers grim

 

From efe.com

 

The second half of my tuppence-worth about the current, dire situation in Sri Lanka and the shower responsible for it.  

 

The feel-good factor generated in 2015 by the election to the Sri Lankan presidency of Maithripala Sirisena, and the expulsion from that presidency of Mahinda Rajapaksa, didn’t last for long.  As I mentioned in my previous post, inflation got worse under Sirisena, and he soon faced criticisms that in Sri Lankan politics sounded depressingly familiar – about nepotism, corruption and bullying the media.  He even managed to make the world’s headlines, and make a dick of himself, regarding Enrique Iglesias of all people.  The Latin heartthrob held a concert in Colombo and some excited local ladies threw their knickers at him and ran onstage to kiss him.  Such women were ‘highly uncivilised,’ declared the unimpressed president, and he called for the concert’s organisers to be ‘beaten with toxic stingray tails.’

 

My Sri Lankan colleagues were soon grumbling to me that the new president was as bad as the old one and that the country’s politicians, whatever their supposed political hue, were “all the same.”  Their cynicism was spectacularly validated in 2018 when Sirisena tried to remove his Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe.  A constitutional crisis erupted because Wickremesinghe refused to leave office.  And who did Sirisena want to replace Wickremesinghe with as PM?  Why, Mahinda Rajapaksa, the man whom he’d ousted in 2015.

 

Sirisena’s attempt to usurp Wickremesinghe failed, but the resulting governmental dysfunction surely contributed to intelligence failures that enabled the Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka the following year.  Indian Intelligence had warned that the National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ) were going to carry out a terrorist attack, but no action was taken.  269 men, women and children died as a result. Sirisena’s government later had to apologise for its ineptitude.  This was surely the last nail in its coffin – and the beginning of the return of the old dynasty.  I remember looking at Twitter on the day of the bombings, just before social media was suspended in an effort to stop the spread of misinformation, and seeing calls for the reinstatement of ‘Iron-man Rajapaksa’ to clean up the mess.

 

Thus, the election later that year, 2019, was a foregone conclusion.  Not that we were spared the usual dodgy campaigning.  I was running another training course, this time in the northern, predominantly Tamil city of Jaffna, when the Rajapaksa roadshow rolled into town and a rally was held beside the training building.  Sri Lankan politicians like their rallies, although often there’s not much correspondence between the people attending the rally and the location where the rally takes place.  Accordingly, I doubt if you’d find many Rajapaksa supporters living in Jaffna, but a great crowd of people still turned up, which possibly had something to do with the dozens of buses parked along the sides of the neighbourhood’s streets.  Soon, amplified voices were blasting through the walls of the training building, speechifying in praise of the House of Rajapaksa.  I remember the face of one of my trainees, a Tamil Catholic priest, contorting in disgust and rage at them.  (Priests had not been spared during the end-of-war massacres in northern Sri Lanka.)

 

From twitter.com

 

However, this time, it wasn’t Mahinda Rajapaksa who bagged the presidency.  Getting the job instead was his brother Gotabaya, former Secretary of the Ministry of Defence and former Lieutenant Colonel in the Sri Lankan army, less flamboyant than Mahinda but no less mired in allegations of human rights abuses, media intimidation and corruption.  Mahinda settled for the post of Prime Minister.  Let’s not say those Rajapaksa boys are undemocratic.  Meanwhile, youngest brother Basil got the post of Minister of Finance and oldest brother Chamal got the unwieldy-sounding portfolio of ‘Minister of Internal Trade, Food Security and Consumer Welfare, Mahaweli, Agriculture, Irrigation and Rural Development’.  In addition, there was now a brood of younger Rajapaksas to accommodate.  Chamal’s son Shasheendra became Advanced Agriculture Minister in 2021.  Mahinda’s sons Yoshitha and Namal became, respectively, PM’s Chief of Staff and Sports Minister in 2020.

 

A word about Namal Rajapaksa, until recently seen as the family’s heir apparent, as the man who’d take the reins and ensure that Sri Lanka remained a loyal Rajapaksa fiefdom well into the 21st century.  Appropriately for a Sports Minister, he has some sporting achievements on his CV.  He’d been a keen rugby player, or as local sports journalists would term it, ‘a keen ruggerite’.  (I love Sri Lankan English, but I wish the word ‘ruggerite’ would be expunged from the language.)  He captained the national Sri Lankan rugby team from 2013 to 2014, an honour I’m sure he got on account of his playing ability and not who his dad was. In a portent of what his family would do to the country, his captaincy saw the team get demolished 132-10 by Japan.  A less funny and far darker rugby connection was, to quote his Wikipedia entry, the allegation of his ‘involvement in (the) murder and torture of Wasim Thajudeen’.  Thajudeen was a fellow rugby player whom he had a feud with.

 

In March this year, when Sri Lanka’s economy had dropped through the floor and the population was panicking about finding fuel and paying for food, Namal lit up the country’s social media with images of himself living it up and enjoying luxury water-sports facilities in the Maldives.  It doesn’t surprise me that a friend who got introduced to him at a reception described him as one the most insufferably entitled people he’d ever met.

 

Thus, the 2019 election resulted in the government being infested with more Rajapaksas than ever.. The great Rajapaksa kleptocracy was back on track.  To keep everyone happy, President Gotabaya – ‘Gota’ – initiated sweeping tax cuts, a move that with hindsight was a wee bit unwise.

 

So, what could go wrong?  Well, as we’ve just seen, everything.

 

Shortly after my departure from Sri Lanka, things got really bad.  There were massive, daily power cuts.  Photographs and film clips of seemingly endless lines of vehicles, queuing for hours or even days in the heat – heat in which, tragically, several people died – outside depleted petrol stations became familiar images on the world’s media.  Meanwhile, protests against the Rajapaksas gathered a head of steam.  The protestors, whose slogans included ‘Gota’s gotta go’, must have included many people who’d voted for the clan in 2019.  Given the damage inflicted by the fertiliser fiasco, I can’t imagine even the rural, conservative, Sinhalese heartlands feeling any love for them now.

 

© Lilith & Cupid Studios

 

Basil Rajapaksa resigned as Minister of Finance on April 8th.  Chamal Rajapaksa, now just ‘Minister of Irrigation’, quit five days earlier.  Mahinda clung on to the post of PM until May 9th.  Then, in an effort to escape resignation, he used the familiar ploy of bussing in supporters to stage a show of strength.  This backfired, to say the least.  He brought a mob of goons, stooges and thugs to the Prime Minister’s Residence of Temple Trees on Galle Road.  The mob assured him that everyone still loved him and didn’t want him to resign.  No doubt they got boozed up on free arrack as well.  Then they spilled out onto the street, proceeded to Galle Face Green and attacked the anti-government protestors who’d been camped there peacefully for weeks.  When the general populace saw what was happening on TV and social media, they reacted in fury and took to the streets themselves.  (A timeline of the shenanigans on May 9th is provided here by the excellent factchecking and investigatory group Watchdog, whose founders include the Sri Lankan data scientist and science fiction writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne.)

 

It was lucky that the country didn’t tip over into violence and anarchy then. Afterwards, Mahinda Rajapaksa had no choice but to resign.  One consequence of the unrest provoked by his stunt was that the Rajapaksa Museum down in Hambantota, built with state funds and using the manpower of the Sri Lankan Navy, got trashed.  Talk about karma.

 

After that, it was just President Gota who, politically speaking, was the last Rajapaksa standing.  He didn’t depart until after a deluge of protestors invaded the presidential residence in Colombo’s Fort area on July 9th  which led to another glut of images on social media, this time of protestors enjoying the cool waters of the presidential swimming pool, lying on the presidential four-poster bed, watching news coverage of their own demonstration on the presidential TV, and so on.  Allegedly, the protestors also discovered bags containing 17.8 million rupees.  Even by presidential standards, that’s a lot of loose change to keep lying around the house.  Gotabaya didn’t agree to resign until a few days later – after he’d got out of the country.  His efforts, and his brother Basil’s efforts, to flee had a tragi-comic quality.  Attempts to leave Sri Lanka using commercial flights were thwarted by immigration officials refusing to process their papers and by fears that their fellow passengers would beat them up.

 

However, Gotabaya has definitely left now.  He flew in a military aircraft to the Maldives and from there travelled to Singapore.  Yes, at the moment, he’s in the country that I’m in.  Indeed, if the rumours are true about him being holed up in hotel in the Singaporean neighbourhood of Orchard, he might only be a stone’s throw away from my workplace.  The Singaporean authorities are adamant that he won’t be getting asylum.  While he’s here, I’m sure they won’t be taking any advice from him on how to run their economy either.

 

© Lilith & Cupid Studios

 

While it’s gratifying to see the Rajapaksas scuttle off like this, disgraced and despised, every Sri Lankan I’ve spoken to has insisted that they should stay in the country.  They should be put on trial for their many crimes, have their corrupt ways exposed and, most importantly, be stripped of all the money they’ve looted from Sri Lanka during the past two decades.  That money should be returned to the country in its greatest hour of need.

 

What happens next?  I’m afraid I’m not optimistic.  The Sri Lankan economy is now a disaster, and where there’s disaster, disaster capitalism is never far away.  I can see the country being at the mercy of the IMF and having to re-structure its economy in the extreme, impoverishing, free market-worshipping manner described by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine (2005).  From past experience, that means the sale of public assets, with the result that the majority of people get poorer and an already-rich minority, able to take advantage of the new, rapacious economic climate, become even richer.

 

Meanwhile, the old Sri Lankan practice of confining politics to a small, wealthy, well-connected elite – which, come to think of it, they may have inherited from the British – shows no sign of going away.  The ubiquitous Ranil Wickremesinghe, who’s served as Prime Minster six times (yes, six!) in the past, has now installed himself in the presidency, has denounced the anti-government protestors as ‘fascists’, and has sent in police and security forces to violently clear the protestors from their encampment in Galle Face.  All this from a man who on May 9th condemned the attack by Mahinda Rajapaksa’s minions on the same protestors.

 

From twitter.com

 

It’s not the removal of a few, corrupt old faces that Sri Lanka needs.  it’s an overhaul of the whole, entitled, business-as-usual political system.  But I wonder how much chance there is of that happening.

 

As the Who sang, “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss…”  But let’s hope Sri Lanka won’t get fooled again.

Posted on

Percy, prince of darkness

 

From wikipedia.org / © Prime Minister’s Office

 

In late February this year, I moved from Sri Lanka to Singapore.  It’s fair to say, though, that Sri Lanka still occupies most of my headspace. The country has made the headlines lately for all the wrong reasons and I’m constantly visiting the websites of Sri Lankan news outlets, following events on Sri Lankan social media, getting WhatsApp messages from friends still living in Sri Lanka and discussing the situation there with Sri Lankans I know in Singapore.  It will definitely be some time before I switch to a Singaporean frame of mind.

 

The crisis in Sri Lanka supports Ernest Hemmingway’s famous assertion that things first develop ‘gradually’ and then develop ‘suddenly’.  During the second half of 2021 it was apparent that, slowly but surely, the country was going off the rails.  Inflation had been an issue for a long time – I can think of many commodities that, within a couple of years of my arrival in Sri Lanka in 2014, had doubled in price – but even by recent standards prices were surging upwards. Also creeping up relentlessly were fuel prices, one symptom of which was the constant upping of fares by the country’s army of tuk-tuk drivers.

 

Then there was the exploding gas-canister phenomenon.  From the start of November until the middle of December 2021, almost 730 canisters had exploded, often in people’s kitchens. The majority of these had been bought from Sri Lanka’s state-run Litro Gas Lanka Ltd but nobody, company executives or politicians, seemed in a hurry to take responsibility or hold someone else responsible for the carnage. I heard rumours that Litro had changed the make-up of the canisters’ contents to cut costs, inadvertently making them dangerously volatile.  For a time, Litro and the other main supplier, Laugfs, had to stop selling their normal canisters and only sell ones that’d been approved by the country’s Standards Institute, which caused the gas supply to dry up.  This wasn’t ideal in a country where just over 40% of the population used the stuff and nothing else for cooking.

 

And then there was the fertiliser fiasco.  In April last year, the government banned all chemical fertilisers, plus pesticides, weedicides and fungicides, for the supposed purpose of converting Sri Lanka’s two million farmers to organic farming – overnight, apparently.  While this attempt to make the agricultural sector ‘go green’ might seem a noble, if fatally rushed and over-ambitious, undertaking, the Sri Lankan rumour mill suggested darker reasons for why the government did this – namely, that it was a ploy to make thousands of farmers bankrupt, so that powerful interests could buy up their land at reduced prices.  Whatever the real reason for it, the policy had quick, tangible but negative results. By October, food inflation was at nearly 12% and experts were predicting the output of the country’s paddy fields to drop by 43% in 2021.

 

With hindsight, I realise I left Sri Lanka near the end of the ‘gradually’ part of the process whereby things went tits up.  The ‘suddenly’ part happened a few weeks later. That was when the country was stricken by power cuts lasting many hours and its fuel supplies ran out, due to it having no more revenue to pay for imports.  The weeks after my departure was also when mass protests began against the government.  These protests culminated in the Rajapaksa clan being chased out of office and last week, in the case of the Rajapaksa who’d been president, chased out of the country.

 

Ah, the Rajapaksas.  Living in Sri Lanka for the last eight years was like living in a beautiful house with a beautiful garden and beautiful views, but with dodgy drains.  The Rajapaksa dynasty were like a bad smell from those drains, sometimes faint, sometimes severe, which never wafted away.

 

When I arrived in 2014, Mahinda Rajapaksa had been president for nine years.  In November 2005, during the later years of the Civil War between government forces (representative of the Sinhalese majority) and the northern-based Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, aka the Tamil Tigers, he’d taken power after winning an election with a slim majority of 190,000 votes.  He was fortunate that the Tamil Tigers forbade the Tamil people, who’d have definitely voted against him, from participating in the election.   It was as if the Tamil Tigers had wanted a Sinhalese-nationalist hard man like Rajapaksa to win.  There’d be no pussyfooting around.  There’d be a bloody fight, all Tamils would rally to the LTTE’s cause and hopefully, with Rajapaksa hammering at them, they’d win more international sympathy and support.

 

If that was the calculation, they got the fight they wanted but not the end-result.  By 2009, the Sri Lankan military had crushed the Tigers in the country’s northeast and Rajapaksa could declare victory.  Ignored, hushed-up and forgotten in the rush to celebrate the war’s end was the civilian death toll in the zone where Rajapaksa’s forces had wiped the Tigers out.  According to the United Nations in 2011, troops slaughtered some 40,000 people there, and that’s one of the more conservative estimates.

 

Among those demanding that the Sri Lankan government investigate its military for war crimes was Britain’s then-British Prime Minister David Cameron, who raised the issue at a Commonwealth summit in 2013.  Rajapaksa did not take this well and I suspect it contributed to the long, long wait I had subsequently before I could get a visa to live and work in Sri Lanka.  I have British and Irish passports, but the British passport was the one I applied for a visa with, and British passports weren’t flavour of the month at Colombo’s immigration office.  As is usually the case when Britain criticises its former colonies, Cameron’s criticism came with a large dollop of irony.  It was Britain, in its role as imperial overlord, that gave the Rajapaksa clan their first opportunity to shimmy up the greasy pole of Sri Lankan national politics.  In 1936, Don Matthew Rajapaksa, Mahinda’s uncle, was elected to the State Council of Ceylon, which the British had set up based on the model of London County Council.

 

As a foreigner, life in Sri Lanka was superficially pleasant, but I wasn’t there long before I became aware of things going on behind the scenes that you’d associate with bullying, semi-authoritarian, ‘strong-man’ regimes such as Erdogan’s Turkey, Orbán’s Hungary and Bolsonaro’s Brazil – discrimination against minorities, intimidation of journalists and so on.  Meanwhile, Rajapaksa’s face was ubiquitous.  It wasn’t quite George Orwell’s 1984 and ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ but you sometimes wondered if the place was setting off along that road.  I particularly remember seeing billboards depicting the president, plump, moustached and clad in a white jathika anduma, while he grasped the wheel of a ship.

 

It seemed appropriate that his birth-name was Percy Mahendra Rajapaksa.  He definitely looked like a Percy.  In fact, he reminded me of a well-fed Terry-Thomas, the comic actor who’d specialised in playing upper-class cads, bounders and scoundrels in old British movies, including one called Sir Percy Ware-Armitage in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965).

 

 

But Percy, sorry, Mahinda Rajapaksa wasn’t a one-man band.  He had three siblings who were also politicians: younger brother Gotabaya, a former military man who’d served as Secretary to the Ministry of Defence since 2005; younger brother Basil, who’d been Minister of Economic Development from 2010; and older brother Chamal, who’d been Speaker of Parliament from 2010 too.  Needless to say, holding such power, and with few, effective systems in place for public accountability, the family were in a position to squirrel large sums of government and party money away into their own bank accounts and businesses.  Meanwhile, money that was spent in public view was often borrowed and shovelled towards self-aggrandising white-elephant projects.  These included the Colombo Lotus Tower, commissioned in 2012 and finally opened in 2019.  Meant to represent a sacred lotus flower, I always thought of that tower as ‘the hand-grenade on a stick’.

 

The billboard depicting Mahinda Rajapaksa at the helm of a ship reflected the fact that another election was coming up.  In late 2014, as the election neared, I was running a training course on Colombo’s Duplication Road.  One day, for five minutes, the training was disrupted by a cacophony of revving engines and blaring horns outside the building.  This came from a procession of motorcyclists and tuk-tuk drivers, many with Sri Lankan flags fluttering from their vehicles, who were driving by in a stage-managed rally to show support for their beloved President Rajapaksa.  A Sri Lankan trainee explained to me that the rally would wind up at one of Rajapaksa’s residences, where the drivers would be treated to free grub and arrack.  “And that,” she concluded bitterly, “is what our taxes get spent on.”

 

As it turned out, thanks to some wily manoeuvring by Maithripala Sirisena, who’d served as Rajapaksa’s Minister of Agriculture and then Health, the plump, moustached incumbent-president lost the election.  Sirisena replaced him in the presidency.  Sri Lankans I knew reckoned Sirisena had squeezed ahead of Rajapaksa thanks to the combined support of the country’ ethnic and religious minorities – Tamils, Muslims, Christians – and the more liberal-minded citizens living in Colombo.  My experiences bore that out.  When I was in the countryside of central and south Sri Lanka, where people were more conservative and Singhalese nationalism was more of a thing, the tuk-tuk drivers would regularly drop Rajapaksa into their conversations and tell me what a great guy he was.  The tuk-tuk drivers who took me to and from work in Colombo every day were less willing to gush about the topic of Rajapaksa’s greatness.

 

Power was handed over peacefully, though later there were allegations that once he’d realised the game was up, Rajapaksa attempted to do a Trump and trigger a coup.  The military, however, wouldn’t play ball.  Soon afterwards, Pope Francis came to visit Sri Lanka and told everyone how wonderful they all were.  The feel-good factor was high.  Folk were full of optimism, and felt not a little relief.  Surely a corner had been turned.

 

Would it last?  Of course not.

 

© Lilith & Cupid Studios

 

To be continued.

Posted on

Make it stop

 

From wikipedia.org / twitter.com

 

I firmly believe that if the Covid-19 virus, aeons from now, evolves into a multi-cellular organism, and further aeons from that, evolves into a humanoid being with homo sapiens’ abilities of thought and speech, it will look and sound a lot like Britain’s current, though hopefully soon to be ex, Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

 

The big, blonde, blobby and bloviating Johnson and the humble 50 to 140-nanometre-wide Covid-19 virus already share many characteristics.  Both of them made life miserable for large numbers of people in the early 2020s. And both have similar effects on the human physique.  They both induce headaches, exhaustion and severe respiratory problems.  Though with Covid-19, the respiratory problems are the result of it filling the lungs’ air sacs with fluid, which seriously reduces their capacity to take in oxygen.  Whereas with Johnson, the problems come from exposure to his non-stop idiocies, venality, lying and gaslighting, which destroys your will to continue breathing.

 

Meanwhile, just as Covid-19 keeps mutating and keeps coming back at us in a dismayingly endless series of variants, such as the alpha, beta, delta, gamma and omicron ones, so too has a variety of Johnson variants appeared over the years.

 

The 1980s saw the Bullingdon Johnson variant – he was an enthusiastic member of the Bullingdon Club, the Oxford University dining club for posh yobs, who liked to strut around in tailcoats, waistcoats and bowties, wreck restaurants and burn money in front of homeless people. This was followed by the Sacked Trainee Journalist Johnson – the Times dismissed him when they discovered he’d made up a quote for a front-page story – and the Criminal Accessory Johnson – he agreed to supply his old Bullingdon mate, the businessman and future jailbird Darius Guppy, with the address of a journalist to whom Guppy wanted to administer a severe beating.

 

In the 1990s there emerged the Lying-about-Europe Johnson, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, who’d offered him refuge after his fall from grace with the Times – as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Johnson wrote wildly exaggerated pieces on how the evil EU was imposing nasty and stupid regulations on plucky little Britain, helping generate the Euro-scepticism that eventually won the 2016 referendum in favour of Brexit.

 

From unsplash.com / © Annie Spratt

 

Around this time, certain Johnson variants appeared that have persisted to the present day. For example, the Racist, Homophobic Johnson – he’s described black African people as ‘piccaninnies’, described gay men as ‘tank-topped bumboys’, called Chinese workers ‘puffing coolies’, likened gay marriage to bestiality and compared Muslim women to ‘letterboxes’.  That last remark, made in a notorious column in the Telegraph in 2018, was followed by a 375% rise in incidents of Islamophobia reported in the UK.

 

So too emerged the Shagger Johnson – he’s had extra-marital affairs with Marina Wheeler, whom he married in 1993 a dozen days after his marriage to Allegra Mostyn-Owen was annulled, with Petronella Wyatt, allegedly with Anna Fazackerley, with Helen Macintyre, with Jennifer Arcuri, and with Carrie Symonds, whom he married in 2021 following the end of his marriage to the long-suffering Wheeler.  He also tried to punt Symonds into a six-figure-salary job in the Foreign Office in 2018, while he was Britain’s Foreign secretary and she was still his mistress.

 

As Johnson has shimmied up the slimy pole of politics, from Member of Parliament to Mayor of London to leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, further variants have materialised.  There’s been the Partying with Oligarchs Johnson – in 2018, while Foreign Secretary, he was seen stumbling about an Italian airport suffering from a severe hangover, and lacking his security detail, after attending a shindig thrown by Russian media magnate Evgeny Lebedev at his castle near Perugia.  Oddly enough, Lebedev subsequently received a peerage and now, technically, is ‘Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation’.  The Talking Gibberish Johnson has also been observed – blabbering about Peppa Pig during an address to the Confederation of British Industry or filling the 2021 Tory Party Conference with excruciating riffs on his ‘Build Back Better’ slogan, such as ‘Build Back Butter!’ and ‘Build Back Beaver!’

 

Of course, we can never forget the Corrupt Johnson – detected, for instance, during the Wallpapergate saga wherein he and his missus tried to get Tory Party donors to foot the bill for more than 200,000 pounds’ worth of refurbishments to their flat, or during Johnson’s abortive attempts to get dodgy MP Owen Paterson off the hook after the Commons Select Committee on Standards recommended that he be suspended for breaking paid advocacy rules.  Nor can we overlook the Breaking Lockdown Johnson – he seemingly presided over non-stop partying at No 10 Downing Street while the nation was under strict lockdown rules to slow the spread of Covid-19, which resulted in the police issuing 126 fines to Johnson, his wife, his Chancellor and their staff, making No 10 the most lawbreaking address in Britain during the pandemic.

 

From the BBC / © Daily Record

 

Obviously, the most virulent variant is the Big Fat Liar Johnson, which basically manifests itself every time he opens his mouth.  To Conrad Black, media magnate and owner of the Spectator, in 1999 – make me Spectator editor and I won’t become an MP!  (He did.)  To the people of the constituency of Henley in 2001 – make me your MP and I’ll step down as editor of the Spectator!  (He didn’t.)  In response to claims that a mistress had to have an abortion in 2004 – it’s an inverted pyramid of piffle!  (It wasn’t.)  During campaigning for the 2016 Brexit referendum – if we leave the EU, we’ll be able to give an extra 350 million pounds to the National Health Service every week!  (We weren’t.)  To Londoners – I’ll build a garden bridge across the Thames!  (He didn’t.)  To Northern Irish Unionists – I won’t stick a trade border in the Irish Sea between you and the rest of the UK!  (He most certainly did.)

 

To Keir Starmer – as Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, it was your fault Jimmy Saville escaped prosecution for his crimes!  (It wasn’t.)  In response to Partygate – I didn’t know about the parties! / The parties weren’t my fault! / I didn’t realise they were parties! / They didn’t actually break any rules! / I was only at them for a minute!  (He did / They were / He did / They did / He wasn’t.)  On the scandal involving the promotion of MP and serial groper Chris Pincher to the position of the Tory Party’s Deputy Chief Whip – I didn’t know he was a sex pest before I appointed him!  (Oh yes you did.)

 

The Pincher scandal proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for those Tory politicians who’d supported Johnson or at least tolerated him.  Last week, his ministers and MPs turned against him, first with the resignations of Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Education Minister Sajid Javid, and then with a deluge of resignations by MPs serving as ministers of state, private parliamentary secretaries and trade envoys.  Even David Mundell, the embarrassingly cringy and spineless MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, the constituency I’m from in Scotland, quit his position as Trade Envoy to New Zealand.  On July 7th, Johnson at last accepted that the game was up and announced his resignation as Prime Minister.  Here was a scrape that even he couldn’t squirm, worm and wriggle his way out of.  The greased piglet, as David Cameron once called him, had finally been degreased, and spitted, and roasted.

 

Or had he?  People have noted that his supposed resignation speech suspiciously lacked mention of the word ‘resignation’.  Indeed, it lacked anything hinting at the vaguest feeling of remorse or apology.  And Johnson only agreed to resign on the condition that he remain in post as ‘caretaker’ Prime Minister until the autumn, after a new Tory leader and Prime Minister has been chosen.  Ominously, Johnson’s old advisor, now bitter enemy, Dominic Cummings tweeted on the matter: “I know that guy & I’m telling you – he doesn’t think it’s over, he’s thinking, ‘there’s a war, weird shit happens in a war, play for time, play for time, I can still get out of this, I got a mandate, members love me, get to September…’  If MPs leave him in situ there’ll be CARNAGE.”

 

Yes, just as we dread that Covid-19 will never be defeated, and will become a permanent, malignant feature of our increasingly fraught world, so Boris Johnson might never depart either.  God help us.

 

From unsplash.com / © CDC

Posted on

A selfie of Jim Mountfield

 

© The Sirens Call 

 

A few years ago, my partner and I were on holiday in Thailand.  One evening we were having dinner in a restaurant in the historical town of Ayutthaya, which is about 50 miles north of Bangkok.  Come to think of it, this was one of our very last trips abroad, before the Covid-19 pandemic put the brakes on international travel.  The restaurant was called the Old Place and it overlooked Ayutthaya’s River Pasak so that, in the darkness, chains of big, cargo-laden barges were drifting past the terrace where we were eating.

 

It came to our notice that amid the restaurant’s waiters and its (mainly tourist) customers, a young Asian woman was wandering around with a smartphone.  Every half-minute she’d stop somewhere, pose for and take a selfie, then wander off in search of another suitable selfie-spot.  She did this all through our meal: wander about, pause, take a selfie, go somewhere else, pause, take a selfie, ad infinitum.  Presumably the waiters were too busy to approach this strange, restless, selfie-loving lady and demand why she wasn’t sitting down and ordering food like everyone else.

 

And I thought: This could be the start of a story…

 

Well, I’m pleased to say that the story has now been written.  It’s also just been published in the Summer 2022 issue of the dark fiction and poetry magazine The Sirens Call.  It’s entitled Selfless and is attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories.  This new edition of The Sirens Call clocks in at a whopping 239 pages and can be downloaded – for free! – here.