The PTI is holding a sit-in at D-Chowk, Islamabad, and will not leave until it takes Imran Khan with it. I suppose the plan is for him to join the people at D-Chowk. At least that’s what KP CM Ali Amin Gandapur is saying. I presume he is not making his statement from the backseat of a car parked in a garage or from under a bed or behind a sofa. He is so trusted by PTI workers that when they found they had reached D-Chowk, they also found Ali Amin was nowhere to be found, not even in the bathroom he had gone to. He was somewhere in the cloud of dust raised bty his running, disappearing over the horizon.
He has been the subject of much criticism for this piece of him giving discretion the better part of valour, which I think is unfair. I wonder if anyone realizes how long he had had to go thirsty. The PTI’s last two rallies, he went off to KP House afterwards, where he then disappeared. They suspect agencies took him, but I think he was probably just sleeping it off in some corner.
Anyway, what he said about the rally not being over reminds me of a joke that did the rounds about Giani Zail Singh, who became President in 1982. Indira Gandhi as PM asked the various candidates what they would do if elected President. They all said they would act on her advice and sign anything she sent them, after examining it to see if it was in accordance with the law and the Constitution. Zail Singh said that he would just cut off his hand and send it to her, and she could use it to sign whatever she wanted.
Or maybe Ali Amin imagines it being said, “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” Attributed to a sports writer in Texas as rec ently as 1978, it’s actually a reference to opera, when the heroine (usually tragic, usually played by an obese older woman soprano)) sings the last aria. No, this wouldn’t be a reference to Bushra Bibi, because you don’t dare imply that a woman is an ounce above her ideal weight. It refers to a situation which seems likely to end one way, but you can’t predict it until it actually does happen.
Another prediction that could be made is how Donld Trump, not content with having orange hair, has appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr Health Secretary. He’s against fluorine in drinking water. The fluoridation of drinking water is supposed to have eliminated caries, or tooth decay, from the USA.
RFK Jr might be like the general in Dr Strangelove, the 1964 film about the launch of a nuclear war, in being against floridation of water, but unlike the general, who was played Gen George C. Scott in the biopic, does not consider it a Soviet plot. He thinks it reduced US IQs.
Y’know, he might be right. The Roman Empire may have fallen because they used lead pipes for the water they drank. That would cause a fall in IQ. Of course, RFK Jr’s boss might prove the point. His low IQ isn’t caused by fluoridated water, as his childhood predates its becoming widespread. Still,considering the number of times so many millions of people have voted for him, can one doubt that Americans now have a lower IQ than before?
What’s with Kennedys and Republicans anyway? Apart from RFK Jr, who is now in a Republican President’s Cabinet, there was Maria Shriver, who was the Republican First Lady of California, because she was married to Arnold Schwarzenegger. She was the daughter of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver, who was pushed in as George S. McGovern’s vice-presidential nominee after the original nominee, Thomas Eagleton, turned out to having been hospitalized for depression and receiving electroconvulsive therapy. The McGovern-Shriver ticket in 1972 went down to one of the biggest defeats in US electoral history. In parallel with Trump’s election, Eagleton was sent to the Senate by the good citizens of Missouri in 1974 and 1980. Ted Kennedy’s sons have served in the US Congress and the Connecticut state Senate as Democrats, and we don’t know how JFK Jr would have turned out, only he died in 1999.
