THE DIMWIT SWANSONG

Thank god for the parliamentary democracy that we have. Lal Krishna Advani, stand corrected…we are better off in a parliamentary democracy.

The perils of parliamentary democracies are well documented. It’s the presidential ones that are throwing some new light on the relative safety that we have with a functioning or even a semi-functioning multi-party parliament.

Look at US of A for instance. After 8 years of a disastrous Republican presidency, it now has what some will call a semblance of democratic governance with Democrats in charge. And look at the way they have tied themselves in knots over a very commonsensical health reform.

This is what Gore Vidal says in a recent interview and you have to give him some points for this. He says America is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Fine, democracy is mostly a swansong before the “dim-witted”. And here’s how we’re better off. We passed the Nuclear Bill, as opposed to Americans banging their heads against the proverbial dimwit wall for health-care reforms.

At times, you have to thank the Mulayams and Amar Singhs of the world.