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Caught up in their own La Basse
November 28, 2000
Sir/Madam,
Not one of the leaders of so-called major parties has the capacity now to escape their la basse.
There are so many major issues crying out for statesman-like response and the vultures whose only interest is that the majority of the body politic put THEM into power cannot but miss the forest, the trees and all else on the landscape.
Because they have moulded themselves or been moulded by the real controllers of economic and political power whose eye they are really trying to catch so they cannot rise up out of the garbage of their rhetoric and assume the high road of civility let alone civilisation.
Case 1 - Sunday's airport handover or whatever that ceremony was. The opposition leader didn't go although he wants to be the PIP next and if so, will then get the chance to "open" the thing.
The PM in now characteristic style (cultured in the absence of condemnation of earlier acts of the same kind) turned in another display of distasteful behaviour using the occasion for cheap vote-catching antics. At least he seems to think it will catch votes.
Case 2 - The Patos man rants and raves about the two UNC candidates - "Arrest them!" in an equally disgusting episode of ineptitude lacking any modicum of political savvy.
The serious issue of what citizenship means and very important Constitutional questions get lost, sacrificed for momentary populism. And the populism is so poor that the Fox and his boys are now turning the table on the "arresters".
Case 3 - The most brutal anti-democratic attack on workers, similar in so many ways to Reagan's assault on pilots some years before, produces little more than another dancing Minister gleefully boasting on the platform "You see, we gih dem good!".
No one stops to ask how come it took 11 months for some paperwork concerning these workers' lives to move from St Joseph to Port of Spain and why an IADB man is appointed to decide how many people should work in the water authority.
For the thinking people among the body politic: How can such scandalous behaviour attract any serious consideration of voting for these whose naked self-interest now stands so starkly before us.
The world is in a new period. The tattered disguise of "representative democracy" is evaporating rapidly. The political process is being exposed so severely as a process that has nothing really to do with the interests, concerns and desires of the "represented" masses.
The savagery of the contest requires no statesmanship, no "bigness" on the part of the contestants.
They are rather more concerned to show the controllers that they are the right ones for the job of "strong government".
Thus, the crude display of Might is Right and no statesmanship in the WASA issue.
Equally, on both sides the constant calling on the Police to resolve matters of a political nature only foretells that no matter who wins, there will be even more reliance on turning every issue into a question of "law and order". Thus, decree and naked brutality will be relied on more and more to prevent the solution of problems of a social and political character.
Such is the character of the PNM's unimaginative (and failed and rejected) idea of militarisation of the youth to resolve the problems plaguing our young generation.
It is almost as if the contestants are trying to outdo each other in their appeal to coercive power. Such is the nature of the contest whose only aim is to find those most worthy of representing the interests of those whose obscene wealth only demands more.
Those to whom many in the body politic have looked in the past to forestall such gathering darkness are so paralysed by their own selfish motives that they cannot also rise out of their own la basse and involve the workers in deciding what they should be fighting for and how to go about it.
What is needed is real democracy. It must be redefined and renovated so that the body politic exercises its sovereignty over the representatives; so that real discussion on the free and equal union of Trinidad and Tobago can be fashioned including the right to walk away from that union; so that majority can constitute themselves as the nation and determine how society is to meet the needs of all its members.
This is the nature of the struggle all over the globe today. Whether in the East where the same unrepresentative democracy held out so much appeal to those languishing under psuedo-socialist regimes or in the West where the political process now stands exposed in its failures even in the "best democracy".
What is needed is a new quality, not more of the same.
Thinking Trinidadians and Tobagonians must now rise to the challenge and lift our society out of the stinking and stifling stench of the la basse and reshape everything so that society fulfils its responsibility to each of its members.
HOMEPAGE
Copyright © Clyde Weatherhead
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