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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 23, 2002
Somewhere else
With our recent understandable emphasis on places like Israel Palestine Afghanistan Kashmir we sometimes overlook significant events elsewhere. I shall try to make amends this week by writing about some shocking developments in the remote Trans-Caucasian kingdom of Bovril-Marmitia. Many of us only pretended to be interested in the government of this country when it was under the charismatic rule of the trendy leftist playboy Petrus Tralla in the decades before 1984. We tend to dismiss Bovril-Marmitia as a typical one-party dictatorship on the fringes of the Third World. But this is unfair. Despite outward appearances Bovril-Marmitia has or had one of the oldest democratic constitutions in the world. And its capital Angrilla is a modern city of more than a million inhabitants with high-tech industry and every kind of civic amenity. People do not realize there is still a substantial private sector in Bovril-Marmitia even if large chunks of it were nationalized under Tralla and his predecessor Lemuel Parson. Arbitrary government continues to be the key to an economy that has been moving backwards in comparison to the country's neighbours. It is not just a question of government ownership and mismanagement. Through systematic corruption of the political process going much deeper than mere place-holding and payoffs the ruling National Party has succeeded in gaining effective control over corporate decision-making and many other strata of economic and social life that are properly none of a government's business. The country's leading businessmen now find themselves beholden to the National Party for regulatory and licensing decisions which can in effect make or break them. In the example given by my correspondent Amos Lappintunnel a writer for the Angrilla Blatter the party apparatchiks have it in their power to award or withdraw the equivalent of licences to print money through the feared B.M.C.A. the Bovril-Marmitite Communications Authority. Through other shady legislation which stifles corporate competition by limiting ownership of such things as newspapers to citizens of Bovril-Marmitia alone a small number of large media consortia have been created all of which are now under the ultimate control of friends of the National Party who could lose their shirts if they stepped out of line. "This was a bad enough state of affairs Mr. Lappintunnel told me, when the party was a cabal of powerful regional bosses. It becomes still worse when all power is concentrated in a single pair of hands." After discovering what he took to be a plot to hasten his retirement the prime minister of Bovril-Marmitia one Jan Kruxida despatched the one remaining individual with an alternative power base to his own. It was according to my correspondent an attempt to set himself up as prime-minister-for-life . Mr. Lappintunnel was referring to the recent firing (or resignation according to the state information office) of the Bovrilian chancellor of the exchequer Pol Merdu by Prime Minister Kruxida which briefly jeopardized the trading position of the national currency known as the "slutsky". (The country is technically a monarchy under a certain Queen Adriana but Mr. Lappintunnel says both she and her consort Prince Blowgard are themselves notorious National Party flunkeys.) According to a whispering campaign from Mr. Kruxida's office Mr. Merdu was behind leaks about government financial scandals to newspapers including the Angrilla Blatter. But as close observers realize (my correspondent reports) Mr. Merdu and his supporters are no better than Mr. Kruxida and his and play the same kind of hardball games behind the scenes albeit a little less successfully. As Mr. Lappintunnel opined The more you look into it, or simply read the reports of the state auditor, the more you see there is nothing to choose between different factions of the ruling party. The 'culture of corruption' would be unlikely to change, with a change of leader. Whether there ever will be such a change is now an open question. A week ago the most astonishing event took place when the publisher of the Angrilla Blatter was suddenly sacked apparently as punishment for having allowed attacks on the Kruxida government to appear in his paper. The event came as a severe shock to journalists throughout Bovril-Marmitia and has had an especially chilling effect on writers for the papers in the Sordo chain which was acquired a couple of years ago by the prominent Arminian investor and National Party veteran Aspartate Izzirian. Opposition parties have even insinuated that an instruction to "make an example" of this much-respected newspaper executive may have originated with Prime Minister Kruxida who was known to be extremely annoyed with the constant carping against his administration in the pages of the Blatter and its sister publication the Posta Moderna. "I myself would have wished not to be involved Mr. Lappintunnel told me. Under normal conditions I think it's no business of mine who gets hired and fired above me. In fact since war is on the horizon between the Arminians and the various Nestorian and Monophysite states in their vicinity my own writing has been focused almost entirely on international issues. "I happen to detest both Mr. Kruxida and the National Party and was very free in saying so in the past. But with a huge war in the offing I was ignoring them. Suddenly I am presented with a challenge to my credibility." I asked him to explain what this could be and Mr. Lappintunnel stressed the negative influence of the firing at every level of the journalistic profession in Bovril-Marmitia. "It goes to the heart of freedom of the press." "But how does it affect you I asked him. It happens that I have been what you might call a stalwart partisan of the Arminians in their struggle for survival against 'Nestorianist' terrorism he replied. But various Nestorian and other readers write to me constantly accusing me of taking this position at the command of my newspaper's Arminian owners. This is a lie I have been following my own perhaps foolish but sincere judgement as I was doing long before they acquired the paper. "In the past I was always able to say 'Hey everyone knows what I think of Kruxida and my proprietor allows me to vent that. It's not as if he tells me what to write.' But now what am I going to tell them?" Mr. Lappintunnel claims things have got so bad in Bovril-Marmitia that journalists are reduced to writing allegories to communicate important ideas to their readers. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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