A Word To Our Power Hungry Politicians: Hands Off The Nation’s Children!

Hwa is thet mei thet hors wettrien the him self nule drinken. Read aloud, sounds like Greek, doesn’t it? German, even. Gobbledygook? Believe it or not my opening line first appeared in English Homilies in 1175. It is the single oldest English proverb still in use today. Then there’s the easier understood version from John Heywood’s 1546 proverbs collection: “A man maie well bring a horse to the water but he can not make him drinke without he will.” 

Fascinating, isn’t it? The English language, I mean. As for the proverb itself, I wouldn’t bank on its potency in this day and time when it seems all things are possible, depending on who says so and to whom. Some here will swear on the lives of their several baby mamas that they witnessed, as they strolled past the recently completed public Square in Soufriere at two in the morning, a bolom pick up a parked truck and hurl it in the manner of Thor to the top of Gros Piton. Or that they had seen running in the recent National Day sweepstakes horses earlier pronounced dead by well respected local veterinarians whose names they had vowed never to reveal. (For those yet to read Father Lambert St. Rose’s riveting accounts of his supernatural encounters: A bolom is a homeless fetus understandably possessed of a vile disposition and unlimited strength. And just in case you’re wondering, the good Father is alive and well and still turning out Netflix-worthy stories despite having wrestled a bolom or two.)    

As mindboggling as are such tales, the inventors are somehow able to convince even the more celebrated brains on this rock of sages of their veracity, to the extent that they experience no discomfort repeating them to ever accommodating Andre Paul on What Makes You Mad. In these Trumpian times of miracles and wonder, when more than a few of us believe dead thoroughbreds can gallop at hair-ripping speeds, who will say for certain that you can’t lead a horse to a long dried up river and watch him self nule drinken!

It’s simply impossible to determine these days what is or is not believable, or how people will react to what’s in front of them. Hardly had the cover of last Saturday’s STAR appeared online than the discombobulating fantastical comments started appearing. Among the more fascinating: “Replace Chastanet with a picture of Jesus. What’s the difference?” 

Non sequitur, you say? A juiced-up antichrist grinch gone bonkers? I promise you, dear reader, it’s about to get weirder. But first, a recap for the benefit of those who may have missed the previous edition of this newspaper featuring an item centered on a devilish meme that could have been concocted only by a particularly repugnant racist, a deranged power seeker—or one of those nameless non-nationals in our midst referenced by a sweating Ernest Hilaire during the widely monitored most recent general elections in Dominica. 

What evidently inspired the devil meme was a harmless photograph of two brothers, both minors, posing happily together with the country’s prime minister at the recent Pitons Races. In the picture, posted online, everyone is appropriately attired for a day of outdoor fun. 

For purposes unfathomable to regular minds, an unknown miscreant artist had doctored then reposted the picture with the boys now shirtless and muddy, iron collars and chains around their necks. The prime minister’s image was left unedited. So too the happy faces of the two minors. 

Last Saturday I took the unknown meme maker to task. Accompanying my piece was the obnoxious item, but with the boys’ faces rendered unrecognizable—not only to spare the minors and their parents further embarrassment but also because of universal child abuse laws and others relating to the publication of obscene and racist depictions. 

Now that you’re in the loop, dear reader, perhaps you’d like to take a shot at what may have inspired the earlier-mentioned antichrist reaction. In any event, you’ve been warned: this story gets more twisted. An overseas reader and son of the soil opened the batting with a phone call early Saturday morning: “What kind of monsters is Helen producing these days?”   

“Monsters?” I asked.  

And he said: “What else but a grimy swamp creature would do this? I’m ashamed even to discuss it with Caribbean friends out here, let alone with guys at my golf club who are used to hearing me brag about the fairest isle of all the earth. How do I speak in the same breath about Botham Jean’s little brother and that aberration?” 

“Oh,” I chuckled, “you’re talking about that business at Marigot last weekend. Well, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it appeared in . . .”

He cut me short. “Marigot my ass. Drunks at least have an excuse for their pig behavior. But we’re talking about kids, man. Minors. How could anyone manipulate a picture in this way? Who does this?”

Suddenly the British singer Max Bygraves sounded in my head. “When it comes to politics,” I said, “fings ain’t wot they used to be. Not even in God’s country where recently the antisocial media scored the resignation of a California Congresswoman, while the leader of the free world lives for the slightest opportunity to ‘grab ‘em by the pussy!’ ”   

The overseas caller and I have long been friends. We share a penchant for understatement, sailor humor and biting sarcasm. Not so on Saturday. “Quit shitting around,” he said, not a little agitated. “These are grown-ups you’re talking about. Guys three times married who invite Russian hookers to pee on them. Politicians are free to carry on like monkeys in heat. But we’re supposed to protect kids. Not put them online like dogs with collars around their necks. Man, I gotta go, I can’t talk now, I’ll call you later.”  

Over the next several hours I took more calls from folks I believed had long ago expired. Some were fearful their commitment to the Red Zone might be at risk should it leak we were on speaking terms. I offer two samples of their shared concerns:  

“I hope you don’t think that damn picture in your paper had anything to do with the Labour Party. I know how your mind works. Next thing you’ll be telling people on TV that Pip’s behind it.”

I reassured him. “The Philip J. Pierre I know would never stoop so low,” I said. “It’s some of you who want to turn him into a George Odlum that existed only At the Rainbow’s Edge.”  

There was no reaction. I dug my thorn deeper into his side. “Actually, there’s a chance the slave picture was commissioned by someone desperately seeking to impress Kenny,” I teased. “But if not the Labour Party’s dirty tricks department, then where else could it have come from? The ONE guy can barely string three words together, let alone use sophisticated image-altering software.”  

He rediscovered his voice, coughed: “You tryin’ to say it have something to do with Mondayzod? Why you eh saying is one ah dem fellas that promise last year dey was goin’ to cross the floor and then dey get some big Christmas money to change their mind?”  

I let that lying fleabag sleep, feigned confusion: “Mondays odd? What’s so odd about Mondays, anyway? Who the hell is Mondays Odd?”

He gurgled again: “Rick Wayne, boy, you eh changin’ at-all-at-all-at-all. You gon die so. Have a blessed day.”

Sample Two: “I tellin’ you straight. Anyone do dat to my child I drawin’ pictures on their chest.” He paused, snorted before adding: “You know I is de kinda artist does use cutlass as paint brush, eh? Like Jallim Eudovic. Jwé épi mwen pas jwé épi ich mwen—“Mess with me, don’t mess with my kids!”

I’ve saved the best for last: a call from a once upon a time shopping arcade jester, notorious now for his often bizarro postulations and far-out conspiracy theories. He started typically. “Whenever something like this happens,” he said, referencing the devil meme, “a bunch of well organized UWP hacks come together to accuse me on Unitedpac of all kinds of things I know nothing about. I can take it. I know how to fire back. You want to hear something? I found that meme quite disappointing.”

“Disappointing is the least of it,” I said. “To use kids in that way is illegal in every civilized country. It also reeks of racism. Pots calling kettles white!”

He disagreed. Politicians all over the world use kids in their campaigns, he insisted, and cited as evidence leaders of political organizations here and abroad. 

He turned without signaling: “What about the two youths on your show that said they wanted to shoot Kenny Anthony?”

I set him back on track: The defaced minors in the offensive meme were with their parents at the National Day races when they bumped into the prime minister. Their mother asked him to pose with her two little boys. As for the young men who had appeared on my show some four years ago, one was in his late 20s. The other had just turned 19. Only the last mentioned had referenced the day’s prime minister—and only after I asked him how his unemployed friends were coping with the difficult times. His answer was that most of them were frustrated, to the point that one had called him to moan about being broke and unemployed for more than a year, with a jobless girlfriend and baby to care for. Several weeks before the TV episode another former schoolmate of his had told my guest during a phone conversation that he sometimes felt like picking up a gun when the prime minister was talking his talk at the Castries market and . . .

The resultant outrage was fabricated. My guest had said nothing that was not already well known. According to a 2002 World Bank Report on Caribbean Youth Development, “A large number of at-risk Saint Lucian youth feel excluded from decision making in the development of the country and even from their own communities. In addition, at-risk youth, especially males from ghettoes, are branded and socially excluded because of the communities in which they reside, further promoting their isolation. Feelings of rage are prevalent among youth . . .”

The day following my recalled TV show the headline hunters from the various media outlets were scrambling over each other in their haste to underscore the host’s demonstrated poor judgment. Especially busy were the more adventurous of the Red Zone’s activists. To his credit, when interviewed the prime minister said he was not unduly disturbed by the reported threat on his life, it was all par for the course, he’d been threatened several times before. But then that was hardly enough to deter overzealous cops from stopping and searching my young guest at every opportunity.

I reminded my caller that all the two minors featured in the disturbing meme had done was pose for a picture with their country’s prime minister on National Day. From their vantage, the prime minister was just another celebrity at a historic event—never mind that some with their eyes on public office had sought desperately to turn a horse race into some kind of referendum.  

Still my caller didn’t get it. He insisted on reminding me that the current prime minister had once referred to his predecessor as “massa,” something he said no other prime minister before him had ever done, and racist.  

Again I set him on course: In 1997 this was how a retired John Compton had explained to the media his unexpected return to front-line partisan politics: “I did not spend most of my life fighting the Barnards only to have another one take this country back to the time of sugarcane plantations. Massa day done!” (Kenny Anthony’s father was the Englishman and local plantation owner named David Barnard. For reasons proffered by the former prime minister himself that I need not revisit, and unlike his siblings, Kenny Anthony had chosen to dissociate himself from the Barnard family name.) 

As for the claim that Chastanet had once used the word “massa” at a press conference, that was only half true. The date, May 18, 2016. Chastanet was in election mode criticizing a government policy he said reflected “a massa mentality.” What is undeniable is that when Chastanet still worked in the private sector a newspaper correspondent and committed Red Zoner had often egregiously referenced Chastanet’s skin tone. The “massa” word was tossed at Chastanet more times than he’d had hot dinners, to borrow another old English cliché.   

Regrettably, such exchanges among politicians, however offensive and indicative of a toad’s character, have long been the norm here—in our House and elsewhere. Permitting innocent children to be cannibalized by unconscionable power hungry jackals speaks volumes, not only about our more contemptible politicians but also about their cowardly aiders and abettors!   

My caller concurred—I think!