A Clap for Kuwait’s Kakistocracy
The Roman author Suetonius in his “Life of Nero” (Chapter 20, Lives of the Twelve Caesars) wrote that the firefond Emperor hired five thousand young sycophants and taught them three different kinds of applause to use in his political performances:
Bombi: from the humming of bees
Imbrices: from the rattling of rain on a roof
Testae: from the tinkling of porcelain vessels clashed together
In Paris by the mid-19th century, theatrical claques were organized into “platoons” whose various “squads” were rehearsed to laugh, cry, comment on, and encourage the actors. As the anonymous bard once wrote:
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages”
Kakistocracy is defined as government by subordinate persons; a form of government in which the least qualified, benighted bobbleheads are put in a position of power, pesky purse-proud pococurantic phylarchs peculating promiscuously. Tub-thumping totalitarians. They vitiate when they should instead vitalize. They destroy any amour-propre. To summarize Kuwaiti style:
ما في بهل بلد الا هل ولد
and
لي حبتك عيني ما ضامك الدهر
Too long have both branches of our government been ravaged by profligate featherbedding, fatuous fighting, laconic logrolling, and thewless technocrats egged on by a panegyric press full of paeans of praise or epigrammatic encomiums on economic reform; churning charlatan confabulations of a certain contumelious conurbation coined from an ancient fabulous sabulous silk route or simply celebrating political pork-barrel pantaloonary. Just a lot of tzimmes and hullabaloo. Junket junkies prone to jactation, who wheedle and woo their way to oblivion. Malevolent milquetoasts spewing scurrilous and vituperative hate-speak. Tautological tergiversation. Biomorphic bimbos with the protozoan personality of an amoeba.
يطبلون حق بعض
ويحطونلك الشمس بايد والقمر بايد
واخر شيء…بربس
In the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Happy 57th National Day and 27th Liberation Day.