The tragedy of everyday politics

I am learning to live with a new term - Dimaagi Naxal - which roughly translates into Intellectual Maoists. The Indian Prime Minister, who is a master practitioner of three letter acronyms and numerology and a student of 'entire political science', has floated the term recently. The irony is hard to miss: He is launching his own 'Cultural Revolution' to rid the society of those who disagree with the monochrome vision of Hindi-Hindu India, and who is better to invoke than Mao even if it is done in this backhanded way! 

This is another of those political absurdities that surround us every day. The performance politics, of which the Indian Prime Minister is an acknowledged expert, has taken over the dour activities of justice and law-making. One could watch the grand inquisition of a law enforcement officer, Jack Smith, as a great TV drama, complete with tragedy, criminals and crime, as evidence of this mind-bending change. While I know little about North Korea, I can not but think that this is one form of torture they are spared, because they matter so little and their leaders don't have to keep them engaged. We also matter very little, but our leaders still feel the need of blind-sighting us everyday.

The more I try to avoid this - I have replaced BBC News with Netflix and allowed Google to serve me a daily diet of news with an end-times flavour - I can see the nuts-and-bolts turning. In social media, I see the old Roman plebeian politics - the eternal appeal of bread and circus! The nineteenth century commodity capitalism is back, with the old-style corruption that accompany it. We have returned to the Gilded Age, so much so that even its opponents have started calling themselves Progressives. After decades of atonement, the genocides are back in fashion again, committed with impunity by the victims of the previous genocide, whose moral claim of being able to do so rests on being the victims. Likewise, each word, each idea, are turned on their heads, and used for exactly the opposite meaning: Freedom for intellectual servitude, Equality for the opportunity to be a part of dispossessed minority, capitalism for speculation, etc. 

I have made this my politics - to look under the hood of every word thrown around. The superficiality of ideas and concepts that we are supposed to agree on is staggering, but it has one good side: Because those words are utterly devoid of meaning, there is nothing in them to object to. Therefore, I can agree with anyone politically right now, without that agreement meaning nothing. I can say I am a Capitalist, knowing fully well that those who claim to be Capitalist have never bothered to think what it might mean. This discovery of the inaneness of daily politics is itself a politics of a kind, but I have not yet managed to attach a label to it.