Two suns in one sky
RECORDED history has it that when General Gabriel García Moreno, the absolute monarch of Ecuador, died after sixteen years of rule, a bizarre wake was held for him. His corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a layer of medals. In this country, a similar history has been repeating itself for oodles of years. We have two beloved leaders instead of one, and the end of wake isn't in sight.
I am talking about how this country is divided over its memory of two great leaders. I can already hear the heckles from both sides, the supporters of one side claiming that their leader is much more superior to the leader of the other side.
We are fortunate that those two leaders didn't think like their followers. One of them spearheaded the political struggle, and another spearheaded the militay struggle, but both had put their lives on the line so that we could have our independence. They must have occasionally thought of how history was going to judge them. All great men do. It keeps them on track, like a compass does a navigator.
But in their wildest imagination they couldn't have anticipated that instead of being rallying forces for their people, they were going to create a rift amongst them. They wanted people to enjoy freedom. Instead, people have their minds slavishly shackled to them.
Thus, our politics still revolves around these two leaders. We are still fighting over which of them had declared independence. And the seething hatred on the surface is ignited by the blind fury of personality cult. By all means, politics in this country is the secular form of idol worship.
The dream of independence has an underlying premise, which is to give every citizen the independence of dream. It means everyone in a free country should have his own dream that he must be able to see on his own. This is what both leaders had in mind, not the collective nightmare that puts us on the collision path.
The fact is that they didn't fight for our freedom so that we could have the freedom to fight amongst ourselves. Yet we are fighting in their names, taking them out of context in a Freudian twist. In our inordinate love for them, we are sowing contempt for each other. Niether leader could have wished that hidebound to the past, we should be hellbound in the future.
Yes, personality cult is inevitable in power politics. Lenin, the father of the Russian Revolution, himself was apalled by the tendency to turn him into a mythic hero and resisted it while alive. But after his death, veneration of him became an integral part of the Communist Party's quest for legitimacy. Every Soviet leader henceforth used Lenin's name to consolidate his power and create his own personality cult until glastnost came in the mid-'80s.
The Russians, of course, had an advantage over us. They handled one personality cult at a time, lasting as long as a particular leader lived, replaced by a new cult as soon as another leader took over. But we have two different personality cults going on at the same time. We have two versions of history surrounding them, two doctrines of national identity, and two countermanding ideologies, splitting the country roughly half-and-half.
Is that how those two leaders could have wanted it? Could they have wanted us to fight over them, failing to bury the hatchet amongst us all these years after we buried them? They loved this country and we love them. Then why should the grapes of wrath grow on this fertile soil of enduring adoration?
Have we ever thought that a divided nation is the ultimate desecration of their hallowed memories? Does it ever occur to us that in our runaway passion to worship them, we may have committed sacrilege? They left behind a country, and we turned it into a contention.
It's believed that some planets may have two suns. Alan Boss of Carnegie Institution conjectures such a planet would be a weird place to grow up in. Every day would be different, two suns rising and setting just minutes apart. It would affect the amount of light and heat on the planet's surface.
True for our politics as well, where heat is rising and light is growing feeble. Two suns in one sky. In our wake, we are looking upto them, while the ground beneath our feet is drifting apart.
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