This weekend a new life was breathed into the limping UNC as it got a wonderful opportunity to do once again what it was created to do (and what some say it does best) - campaign.
With internal elections for a Youth and Women's team in full swing, the Party machinery galvanized supporters, whipped them into a frenzied celebration and gave them focus and purpose, if only for an afternoon and an evening.
Not to be wasted, this heady feeling was captured and focused by the announcement of the coming January 24th celebration of one year since Kamla 'stormed the Bastille' of Panday's kingdom and liberated the Party from the tight clenches of its despotic ruler, and will be the springboard for the grandaddy (or grandmummy) of all celebrations, the one year anniversary of her election as first female Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago.
Seriously?
Now don't get me wrong, I am all for pageantry, pomp and revelry, and I fully support and endorse climatic euphoria for its sheer power to unite a people, but shouldn't there be something more though?
I mean, at some point, shouldn't we expect a little more substance for our celebrating?
Speaking to fanatic UNC supporters one cannot help but be reminded of victims of domestic abuse; people who make deflecting excuses for the most glaring of abuses and point out and amplify the tiniest of accomplishments as if to justify the dying relationship and if not convince you, then at least reassure themselves.
And before you think that I believe that this is isolated to the UNC, stay tuned for the upcoming PNM convention and see this same trick played out the Balisier way; the same approach will be used (why fix what works), the same cleaving into 'for and against' camps, the same ignore the failings, excuse the abuses, the same lack of substance or policy used to determine the victor, demonizing, deifying and us against them ad nauseum.
And the same inevitable nothing celebration at the end.
So what's my rant about?
That the people are being deliberately kept politically insipid in both camps because an educated and informed population might reject them all.
That the people are both the victims here and are victimizing themselves; that this is nothing but a mind-game and a not so clever one at that; a mind-game that is based on fear, and where there is no obvious division clever mind benders create them out of pure air.
Take the whole 'knife and fork' indian statement used not so subtly by Basdeo Panday to describe the east indian element of the Congress of the People; coined to cleave Mr. Dookeran's 'educated' class from the plain folk (to whose fears of a world in which they had no relevance or power he appealed), Bas successfully divided the east indian voter into a class system and anointed himself champion of the larger, poorer working class for votes.
As a strategy it was so successful it stopped Winston Dookeran dead in his tracks and quite possibly robbed him of his place in history by yielding his inheritance to Kamla.
Or take Manning's destruction of Rowley; post May 24th elections there remains the continued belief by many in the PNM that it was not Manning's excesses that eventually brought the Party down, but Rowley's inability to toe the Party line or at least shut up.
That idea has gained serious traction within the PNM, and despite their attempts to keep it out of the public eye it has split the Party into two competing factions with some in the know saying that if Rowley's slate is unsuccessful in the upcoming convention the Party may very well split into two and cause Dr. Rowley's eventual political demise.
Us against them, Balisier style.
Look, at some point all of this foolishness has to end, and one would hope that it be sooner rather than later and preferably before we run out of oil and gas; we as a people have to start thinking 'Country First' if we are ever going to save ourselves from this quagmire of exchange and the slow but sure demise of our country.
It is ironic that we are united in our common belief that we are better than each other, and it is supremely ironic that it is this and only this that continues to divide us; rising as a nation and a people requires that we set aside racist notions and class ideas and instead join hands and make national decisions on national issues in the best interest of all.
There will never be a better time to drop the pretense that we are defined by what we think we are not, and while it may seem during the euphoria of the campaign that we are contributing to the greater good, all we are really doing by maintaining the charade is ceding valuable real estate in our mind.
Something to think about...
"tow the party line" , not toe . :-)
ReplyDeleteThe phrase "toe the line" is equivalent to "toe the mark," both of which mean to conform to a rule or a standard. The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002; ed. by Glynnis Chantrell) says, "The idiom toe the line from an athletics analogy originated in the early 19th century" (514).
ReplyDeleteThe specific sport referred to is foot-racing, where the competitors must keep their feet behind a "line" or on a "mark" at the start of the race--as in "On your mark, get set,
go!"
So one who "toes the line" is one who does not allow his foot to stray over the line. In other words, one who does not stray beyond a rigidly defined boundary.