Some of us who stopped looking in our mirrors a long time ago have lately been especially preoccupied with inventing names for the man at the center of our latest scandale politique. Among the casually tossed pejoratives: shameless, stupid, glutton for punishment, hypocritical, amoral, a poor model for our young citizens. Of course such labels would not be out of place around the necks of the more clamorous stone-casters—presumed celibate church leaders in cassocks indelibly stained with the blood of trusting virgins, their ever-faithful flock, single moms and their multiple hit-and-run impregnators, pseudonymous pharisaic contributors to the newspapers and call-in radio programs, chameleonic politicians and their parasitic hacks. It would be difficult to discover an unblemished soul in this city without pity.
What condemns Ubaldus Raymond in the eyes of this putative Christian society is not that he may have indulged in some sophomoric phone sex with a swivel-hipped young swinger after a single encounter in the land of the hummingbird; not that only a few months earlier he had permitted his libido to lead him by the nose into a trap baited with not just one but two determined sirens. Oh no! What rendered Ubaldus Raymond prime meat for the political grill was he had allowed himself to be twice caught. And by caught I mean, on camera. With his pants down. Then there were the incessant replays of his puerile bon mots that reminded of nothing more than a chatterbox virgin teen on his first date.
Nothing so far stated here is meant to mark Raymond undeserving of the lacerating lashes mercilessly dealt him by his avowed enemies in the political media, the worst by some who can hardly be described as virtuous. You venture out unprotected into bug territory, don’t be surprised if you get bitten, over and over and over. Where there’s no blood, leeches perish.
My purpose here is to remind readers of the dangers of selective morality. I once wrote a story about the worst kind of office abuser—replete with evidence of sex with minors, false pretense, misuse of state trappings, obtaining visas by deceit, among other shockers. In consequence I was made the target of some of the country’s most powerful citizens, church leaders included, who cared more for the politician’s reputation than for his deflowered victims. Some of the deadliest volleys were fired at me from the nation’s pulpits. When the earlier outspoken head of the Christian Council was invited to comment this was how he unforgettably explained his reluctance: “If John the Baptist had been more careful he might’ve saved his head.”
As if further to endorse the politician’s unsettling proclivities, at a general election that closely followed my exposé the electorate handed him the mandate of his career. Some thirty years on, lawmakers still have not seen the need to establish a code of conduct for members of parliament, elected and otherwise. Indeed, for all the attention it’s paid, you’d think there was no such thing as the House Standing Rules and Orders!
Not that our politicians have ever pretended to be other than their current public image suggests. One prime minister took obvious pride in reminding me that my criticism of his public behavior was altogether a waste of my time, since “everyone knows womanizing is at the heart of my politics.” With similarly undisguised delight, another MP invited me to write whatever I pleased about him. It didn’t matter, he assured me, since the majority of his constituents were largely illiterate.
Not for nothing has the process of electing citizens to the highest offices in the land been branded “chicken and rum politics.” During one budget debate the late George Odlum took the opportunity to inform House colleagues many young women were in the name of survival surrendering their dignity “in exchange for chicken parts.” Odlum might truthfully have added, “especially in the season of elections.”
In short, what we pretend is today intolerably offensive has long been our culture. We are no more concerned about the recent political shenanigans than we were when, as a boy, I witnessed drunk and disorderly politicians campaigning at a particular rum shop in Laborie.
As I write, Timothy Poleon is desperately attempting to persuade a Newsspin caller that Kenny Anthony’s refusal to shake hands with members of government whenever his party is in opposition sent out all the wrong signals. At first the caller tried to make it a Kenny-Chastanet thing and therefore private, a demonstration of the former prime minister’s contempt for the man elected by the people to replace him. “With all the viruses around these days,” said the caller quite seriously, “Kenny was just being careful.” Besides, he added, “he has the same right as everyone else to choose the hand he shakes.”
The irreducible truth is that in our increasingly polarized circumstances nothing is quite as rare as the sound of reason. And if I may borrow from Thomas Paine: “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like a doctor administering medicine to the dead.” No longer is it possible to hear pronouncements, whether from the floor of parliament, our well-varnished pulpits or our market places that are not spiked with the poisons of partisan politics and calculated divisiveness. Why are so many of us determined not to hear from Allen Chastanet’s predecessor a full account of his deal with Jack Grynberg in the year 2000?
Of course I anticipate the usual suspects accusing me at this juncture of fritinancy, commonly referred to as whataboutism. Forget about what happened years ago, they will likely say, let’s talk about now—as if it were possible to disconnect the present from the past that created it. Were that the case, we would without concern or comment encourage our daughters to make friends with convicted rapists, child molesters and thieves. But then some might remind me that not only do we knowingly elect such characters to office, we often defend them on the basis that they’ve paid their price to society; that their criminality is of the past and therefore forgettable.
Last Thursday I came down hard on the side of burning Ubaldus Raymond whose private conversations with a female were weaponized by his detractors, the presumed holy as well as their unthinking echoes. It has since the last TALK occurred to me that whatever I may have accomplished up to this point was possible only because my own transgressions were not forever held against me; that my occasional demonstrations of poor judgment had not cost me opportunities to do better. I hasten to add that my bad choices never included criminality. Neither Ubaldus Raymond’s. Which is much more than may be said of some of his loudest detractors.
Does any of this sound like I’m suggesting how the senator should pay for permitting himself to be betrayed yet again by selfish individuals with no respect for privacy and confidentiality? As earlier stated, this is merely an open invitation to wipe the dust off your mirrors and examine what you see reflected. Here’s hoping it won’t be by now so grotesque as to scare you off again!
