Dr.Dayan Jayatilleka
“You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” – Jesus Christ (Luke 12: 56) –
I watched the second and final Trump-Biden debate on CNN after I had spent the two previous days watching the 20th Amendment debate on the Sri Lankan Parliament channel.
The rules of the US Presidential debate were drawn up by the independent Debate Commission and included a ‘mute button’ in case either or both candidates kept interrupting. If it were Sri Lanka today (after 20A), the Debate Commission would be picked by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, or to put it differently and implausibly, if the USA had Sri Lanka’s 20th Amendment, the Debate Commission would have been picked by President Trump. Sri Lankan society is divisible into those who would think that would be a good thing, and those (like me) who wouldn’t.