BY NEVILLE DE SILVA

In a few days time the world will know who has crept into the White House in what must surely be a Hobson’s choice that even Hobson would not have contemplated. The two candidates provide as stark a contrast as American history can offer and both count for smells numbers 1 and 2 in the civic nostril.

When the people of the United States are asked to choose between an impudent and temerarious candidate and another whose trustworthiness and judgment are sullied, then we must pity the citizens of the most powerful nation in today’s world just as Sri Lankans pity themselves at the choices they are saddled within their own small political world.

If millions of voters in the US are left with two candidates of dubious character and have to leave their country in the hands of one of them- one an unpredictable maverick and a seeming misogynist and the other an aggressive and dangerous woman whose past performance has shown so-what have they left but to fall back on hopeful incantations.

If such is the plight of the sole super power whose president will have his or her finger on the nuclear button, as it were, what chance will a country such as Sri Lanka have as greater numbers of political Trumps and devious Clintons tramp across the country flying their flags of false promises.

In the last year the world has watched and listened to the tragicomedy being played out on the American stage as the country searched for a successor to the incumbent Barack Obama. Millions of TV viewers were glued to the box as the two candidates slugged it out during three separate debates. But the American electorate has been none the wiser for it. All one saw was the splattering of mud that has stuck to both and hardly improved their images.

So after more than 600 days of campaigning the two will meet for the last shoot out at the O.K. Corral on Tuesday.

But the curtain will not come down on this disgraceful episode in American democracy for the show must go on as it must in our relatively tiny Sri Lanka.

In our own little world there have been plots and sub-plots - some tragic, some comic - in the last 20 months or more as politicians, their business cronies, relatives, friends, political discards and other riff-raff jostled for power, influence and means to fiddle the state and the people.

Sri Lanka may not be much bigger than some states in the US. But that does not mean that our politicians and their hangers-on cannot out do their American counterparts when it comes to putting self before country while oozing patriotism from every pore.

While our attention has remained focused all these months on the comic interludes and scatter-brained campaigns that have gone on in the name of democracy- at- work in the US with such a massive spread of media available to us here, the happenings in Sri Lanka have somehow not received the attention they should have.

Not that we are incapable of turning on our own pantomime. It is just that the timing of the big event across the Atlantic or Pacific depending from which direction one approaches the US of A, has been so distractive that they have gone unnoticed.

So entertaining has been the election drama with even the FBI stepping into add some colour as if it did not have col- our enough, that I almost missed the remarkable comment of one of our own presidents of not too long ago.

As though Sri Lanka’s own political canvass was monochromatic and dull, out steps Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga to add a colourful splash of political gossip.

At an event in Gampaha former president Chandrika Kumaratunga is reported to have said that J.R.Jayewardene, the first executive president, tried to split the SLFP by offering inducements to the then No.2 of the SLFP Maithripala Senanayake and Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Maithripala Senanayake of course has passed away but Mahinda Rajapaksa has laughed off the whole thing.

What intrigues me-like all the stories that are now being told of Donald Trump - is why this story has not been told before. I do not, of course, put it beyond Junius Richard to want to divide the SLFP. He once tried to have Anura Bandaranaike fill a vacant seat by not putting forward a candidate against him at a by-election. It is not surprising that he was called Junius the genius.

The more disturbing question is why this story seemed to have been buried in the recesses of the Kumaratunga mind or wherever and not been told before.