KILLING ME LOUDLY

Dec 05, 2011 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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I once stumbled and almost fell on my face but landed heavily (and with my weight, very heavily) on my hands and knees.  My knees felt like they were broken, my arms were bruised, my elbows were grazed and my lower back started to hurt.  My companion, an Englishman said with a smile, “Have a good trip.”
Nowadays, this is what I say to people who tell me they are heading for Trinidad.  This is a country still in a State of Emergency (SOE).  In fact, when I tried to warn a Trini friend about travelling to Trinidad and warned him about the SOE, he asked drily, “So what else is new?”
Some people say that all Trinis are cynics- they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.  For example, as soon as the SOE was announced, people started calling it a State of Expediency and not of emergency.  The motives of the government were questioned since many people believed that the Government called the SOE to avoid attempts by the labour unions to shut down the country.  Some lawyers said that if crime was the problem, an SOE was not the solution.
There seems to be as well, a high level of superstition involved. A school in a country district (Moruga) was closed twice in the past two years because some of the students were supposedly under a demonic spell.  This is why the man in the following story had to be a Trini.   He was walking across the road when he was hit by a car.  The impact on his head caused him to be unconscious for two days before he finally regained consciousness.
When he opened his eyes, his wife was there beside him. He held her hands and said meaningfully, “You have always been beside me. When I was a struggling university student, I failed again and again and yet you continued to be with me. You were always there beside me, encouraging me to go on trying.”
She squeezed his hands as he continued, “When I went for all the major interviews and failed to clinch any of the jobs, you were there beside me, cutting out more advertisements for me to apply.”  He went on, “Then I started work at this little firm and finally got to handle a big contract. I blew it because of one little mistake. And you were there beside me.  Then I finally got another job after being laid off for.  I was denied promotion many times and my hard work was not recognised.  I was kept in the same position from the day I joined the company until now.  Yet, you were there beside me”
Her eyes brimmed with tears as she listened to her husband :”And now I met an accident and when I woke up, you are here beside me.  You know, looking at everything that has happened there’s something I’d really like to say to you.”  She flung herself on the bed to hug her husband, and sobbing with emotion, he said, “I think you really bring me bad luck.”
This seems to be the reaction, although in much less time, that Trinis have to their new Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar.  It is like the Kim Kardashian or Britney Spears weddings.  The honeymoon and divorce seem to be almost simultaneous.
The story is one that should be of particular interest to the two new Governments in St. Lucia and Guyana.  Disenchantment with Patrick Manning and his Government led to the election, in a blaze of hype, hoopla and hyperbole, of Persad-Bissessar in May 2010.  Earlier this month, when she announced that there was a plot to assassinate her and two of her Ministers because of the achievements of her Government, especially in dealing with crime, the majority of the population did not believe her.  They felt that her claims were extreme, exaggerated and exorbitant.
Several people recalled that during the worst days of the “Black Power” revolution in Trinidad in April 1970, the country’s Prime Minister, Dr. Eric Williams, went walking through the main street of the capital city accompanied only by one of his Ministers, George Chambers (who succeed Williams as PM in 1981).  When asked why he left his security behind and had only Chambers with him, Williams said, “If after all I have done for the people, they want to kill me, let them do it.  If they want to kill me, they will.”  Some also remembered that there was an attempt before the attempted coup in 1990 to kill the First Lady, Zalayhar Hassanali, when her car was attacked and shots were fired.  The verdict was, “She never made a big thing of it.  All that lockdown and talk never happened.  They handled the matter quietly and did not boast about it in the media.”
What the majority of people seem to be reacting to is the tendency of the present Prime Minister and Government to make political capital of everything.  “Why they don’t shut up and just run the country,” was one reaction.
In the past two weeks I have been in Trinidad and have heard tremendous criticism of the Government from many of their former supporters, not for poor performance only, but for shooting off its collective mouth at any opportunity.
There is an old joke about a policeman who found a dead horse on Abercrombie Street and dragged it over to Duke Street because he found “Duke” easier to spell.  The problem people perceive with this Government is that while they might know how to spell “Abercrombie” their first action on seeing an equine corpse regardless of how many times they’ve seen it before, it to take out a whip or take off their belts and flog it mercilessly.
The other side of the coin seems to be no better.  Dr. Keith Rowley, the present Leader of the Opposition, earned the nickname “Rottweiler” for his aggressiveness and ferocity.  He is a highly-rated platform speaker but has been criticized for not concentrating on priorities and attacking everyone and everything regardless.
He seems a compulsive attacker and there is concern that he and his party’s only purpose is to attack everything without developing a program, policy and plan of their own.  He has been forced to apologise twice for making remarks about a particular judgment and later about the judiciary that might be considered contempt of court.
A colleague summed up the Trinidad situation for me, “On the one hand you have a claim of assassination where people have been detained but nobody believes the Prime Minister.  Then you have the Leader of the Opposition with character assassination.  What you have to realize is that the politics in Trinidad is like the word ‘assassination’.  It has two ‘ass’ in it.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that in Trinidad, politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, applying the wrong remedy and boasting about it.

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