The Fickle Finger of Fate
Some members of a particular party who aspire to the imperial purple inked their fingers to show their “solidarity”¹ with the heroic voters in a “liberated nation”².
The voters were “heroic” because the ink was “permanent”³ and those with inked fingers were subjected to the possibility of being killed by insurgents.
This is why I was struck by Dr. David Mikosz’s article in the Technology section of the BBC: Ink helps drive democracy in Asia about voting in Kyrgyzstan.
One wonders why the US funds the use of ink that is only visible under an ultraviolet light in a relatively stable country like this former republic of the Soviet Union, but uses a highly visible ink in a country where voting can make you a target for murder.
The US obviously knew of this safer alternative, but chose the more dangerous procedure. If I were a cynic, I would think that the choice was based on the ability to generate a photo opportunity at a speech.
1. Has anybody told them that Solidarity was a labor union, the union that lead the way to a free Poland, a country we should never forget, unlike those pesky countries in Central America who refuse to understand that death squads are so “last century”?
2. New term for conquered province.
3. Given their attention span, any period of time that is longer than a television ad. Heard on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me: “…this is because no one in the Middle East has heard of a petroleum solvent.”
