THERE is a fictional Gotham City. There is a real Gotham Country. Both are startlingly similar, except in one way. Gotham City has a Batman (and Robin). Gotham Country has none – or so it seems. Gotham's citizens are gulllible people known as Simpletons. It is supposedly ‘run' by inept Idiots whom the Simpletons have willingly put in authority because they love them. They love them because they think the Idiots love them. The inept Idiots use them, abuse them and kick them. And the Simpletons love them even more. There is a Joker in the pack. The inept Idiots don't know whether they are coming or going. The one thing they do know is how to get rich wrongly. The trappings of power are with the Idiots. Real power is with the Syndicate of Villains. The Villians are not citizens of Gotham. They don't need to be because many of Gotham's citizens – far too many for comfort – are agents of the Syndicate – and its agent provocuetuers. The Syndicate owns the Agents. The Syndicate owns the Idiots. The Syndicate owns Gotham. The self-serving onslaughts of the Syndicate of Villains cannot be resisted by the ‘ruling' inept Idiots. Only Batman can keep them in check in the fictional Gotham City. When life there became unliveable, its inept Idiot ‘authorities' and Simpletons beseeched and implored Batman to save them, which he duly does. And they lived happily ever after – until there is a sequel. Not so in Gotham Country. There is no Batman there to come flying in to save the day – or so it seems. The Simpletons of Gotham Country foolishly thought that it was Batman who got them another chance to choose their Idiots and the Joker. They thought that in so doing they were ushering in a New Dawn. Now, not five months later, the realization is dawning that this is yet another False Dawn. Batman was no Batman at all but an errant judge who cannot fly in a straight line. The Joker's influence is far and wide – you can see it every day on comic television, comic newspapers, comical elite chatter, comical obscurants pedaling quick fix solutions, comical Super Brats – sorry Super Bureaucrats and Generals gone to seed – one time Idiots and agents of the Syndicate who have finally been put out to pasture but wish to return to stud even though they can hardly walk … The list of destructive comics that Gotham is infested with goes on and on. It is long, very long. True to type, the Simpletons are again beginning to ask False Batman to “save” them. That's not all. Amazingly, even people from the country of the Syndicate of Villains are beginning to suggest that, “This cannot be allowed to go on. It must be stopped.” These are the very people who nagged Gotham to distraction for eight years, crying themselves hoarse for ‘democracy through elections'. They wanted the Simpletons to choose their inept Idiot overlords themselves. They did. Now that they have chosen the same old Idiots and the Joker, they are asking to abort the process. It strains credulity. One can't believe one's ears. Why did these Nosey Parkers not say, “This cannot be allowed to go on” when the Chairman of their own Syndicate of Villains was destroying Gotham and the rest of the world for eight years with callous abandon? Because that's democracy, the so-called “will of the people”? You wanted elections, you Simpletons of Gotham and Nosey Parkers of Syndicate Country? You've got them. The “will of the people” is before you. The Simpletons have “spoken in their majesty.” Now lump it. Be man and woman enough to suffer the consequences. You've made your bed, now sleep in it and suffer hourly nightmares, waking and sleeping. Only then will you learn. You cannot ask False Batman to “save” you again. Why should he? In any case, he cannot. He doesn't know how. He is programed to defend Gotham from external aggression, not internal stupidity. He will only make another mess, largely at the behest of the Syndicate, whose objective is to enable the Simpletons to bring back the same old inept Idiots, Jokers and Agents so that they can manipulate Gotham and its Simpletons through them. All the time their Agents and Agent Provocateurs are hard at work, in political parties, the bureaucracy and the military, in the private sector, the media and academia… Not to forget Pastureland, from where clapped out Idiot bulls that are beyond anything hold forth in comic newspapers, comic television channels, on the roads and seminars and conferences, awll paid for and arranged courtesy the Syndicate, where they loudly proclaim their potency, trying to beat the unbeatable, the inevitable. The Villains laugh all the way. And so the merry dance of death goes on and inexorably on until Gotham will exist no more. Except in movies, novels and the footnotes of history. The Simpletons don't yet realize that in real life each one of them is a Batman because the only Batman that exists is in each one of them. Only that Batman can save them from the Idiots and Jokers and the Villains of the Syndicate. All they have to do is to let him out. But they will not if they keep asking False Batman to always abort their learning process when it becomes painful or jeopardizes their vested interests. Thus they won't get a chance to pay for their gullibility and simplicity – and let it be said, crass stupidity – for only through suffering from their mistakes will they learn and only when they learn will they realize that their salvation lies neither in the Villains nor in the Joker or the Idiots nor indeed in False Batmen, but in themselves. This time the Idiots and Jokers are making out as if they are playing cricket. They have formed a Combined Idiots XI from four teams. One team only knows gulli danda, not cricket. The gulli is the Simpletons; the danda is with the Idiots. The Joker is the umpire – from both ends. The players of this team have taken their dandas away and are petulantly sitting in the dressing room – “With you, against you; won't play, won't let you play.” The other three teams know only buzkushi, which they play not with dead goats but with live people, to wit the Simpletons. Two of the contributing teams are neither here nor there: they only stand on the field making noises and gesticulating aimlessly – form without substance – like Lucy playing baseball in ‘Peanuts.' The team that leads the Combined Idiots XI belongs to the Joker. Its players really come from the team called the 4-Ps but are being led by the manager of the 3-Ps, who has put the captain of the 4-Ps out to pasture (though recently he too is showing signs to wanting to return to stud). The captain he has appointed cannot even make a speech without clearing it with him. The Combined Idiots XI's opening batsmen were never chosen by the Simpletons. They have been foisted on them through nepotism – an old game of the Idiots. Such people suit the Villains of the Syndicate, for if they are not already theirs they can be made theirs at a moment's notice. When the 3-Ps were chosen by the Simpletons for the second time, they were being led by a young 35-year old girl for the first time. ‘Bhola' the Lahori wit called it a team of Under-19 kids. Their performance was incompetent and reckless. They were knocked out in the first round by a False Batman. All the teams led by the 3-Ps have been Combined Idiots XIs, but this the fourth should be the first Combined Idiots XI led by the 4-Ps. Contrarily, it is being led by the manager of the 3-Ps instead, while he has appointed a skipper who only plays captain but does not lead and cannot read. Duh! Though the Under-19s are now Over-50s, they are still playing as recklessly and incompetenly as they did when they were Under-19s. If the real captain of the 4-Ps were to order his players, “Heel boy; heel girl”, and they didn't, they could be out of the Combined Idiots XI. But they are all scared of the manager of the 3-Ps as long as the Syndicate of Villains supports him. So the captain of the 4-Ps will only order “Heel!” and his Idiots under the wrong manager will only heel if the Syndicate of Villains tells them to. And no False Batman will stop the game either just because the Simpletons and Nosey Parkers are asking for it. No, not until the Syndicate tells him to. Talking of “the simple”, Umberto Eco says in The Name of the Rose. “Joining a heretical group, for many of them, is often another way of shouting their own despair.” “The simple are meat for slaughter, to be used when they are useful in causing trouble for the opposing power and to be sacrificed when they are no longer needed.” “…When your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies. I reflected that this is why the simple are so called. Only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are.” __
