Late US president Ronald Reagan was called "The Teflon President" by his detractors to reflect on how a number of scandals surrounding his presidency seemingly had no effect on his individual popularity with the public. The phrase was coined by Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, who derived it from Teflon, the brand name for a non-stick chemical used on cookware popularised by

American chemical company DuPont. Sitting on the other extreme of the Teflon spectrum are the wretched people of this country. Scandals, slanders and all things shocking committed by their leaders, businessmen and public officials don't appear to stick to them.

That perhaps explains the great futility, which characterises our social dynamics. The TIB trumpets, NGOs natter, civic groups criticise and individual citizens intellectualise, yet nothing works to stanch the hemorrhage. Corruption is conspicuous, crime is copious, mischief is mundane, greed is growing, and lawlessness is limitless. This nation goes through an absurd exercise of writing its rules and erasing them at once.

In other words, thesis and antithesis are compounded into every single function. Leaders are laggards, teachers are cheaters, police are profligate, bureaucrats are bullies, scholars are shallow, wise are wicked and professionals are perfunctory. And each of these pairs of opposites is also equally true in reverse.

That gives us a lockstep of contradictions: One foot forward is offset by one step backward. The surging tide of national interests is held back by the undertow of parochial interests. Every motion is crippled by stagnation. All in all, this is a society that enunciates right and wrong in the same breath. It does that with an equanimity leading to a stasis.

This stasis has the effect of rowing a boat tied to the pier. There is a great deal of efforts going into it and we are making a great commotion in the water with our oars, oblivious to the fact that the boat may not be going anywhere. Everyday workshops, seminars, newspaper columns, television talk shows, political rallies, court verdicts, statements, comments, screams and shouts are generating so much steam, yet the engine doesn't cough to life.

The law of motion is that an object at rest stays at rest and an object continues in motion until an external force acts on it. Both are simultaneously happening to us. What hasn't changed doesn't change. Our politics is its best example, our pathological passion for all things dubious being next. One may also throw in our complete disregard for the rule of law.

Again, what can be changed has been changed. Our economy has done well and living conditions have improved. Compared to 1971, everybody in this country is better fed, clad, and housed. Loin clothes are gone, mud huts have disappeared, and emaciated bodies scarred by hunger are hard to find.

This condition of half change and half constancy is comparable to that of a paraplegic. This nation has a vibrant upper half sitting on its vegetating lower half. It has the duality of the Janus masks, which are a set of two separate masks, one happy and one sad. It can also be compared to Ouroboros showing two snakes, each biting the other's tail.

This dichotomy amounts to the clinical condition of split personality when each part is dominant and controls behaviour in a bizarre neurosis. And that neurosis is apparent in each and every one of us, who don't practice what they preach. Hypocrisy at the lowest level, this state of mind is progressively deluding us. We don't say what we believe, and we don’t believe what we say.

A top bureaucrat from the yesteryears has recently said that the police are now under political control. As much as he has stated the obvious, he has also understated it. Police in this country have always been under political control so much as anything else. Bureaucracy has been under political control, trade and commerce have been under political control; teachers, students, doctors, lawyers, judges, singers, actors, journalists, and even beggars on the street are driven by partisan passion.

This is but an example of how we refuse to see the whole picture, truth trivialised in its truncated form. If we look at 43 years of independence, history has been like a mutilated body, everybody running with his or her choicest parts. This terrain is broken into pockets of influence instead of making a coherent whole because in so much as we are sticking together we are also falling apart in that struggle.

On the eve of yet another Victory Day, it's the Teflon that comes to mind. The leaders don't stick together; neither do the people. Nobody sticks to anything, and everything is in a state of fluid flow. In this Teflon republic, government sticks to election no more than power resides with people.

The writer Is Editor, First News and an opinion writer for The Dally Star. Email: badrull51@yahoo.com