[dropcap]A[/dropcap]dministration after administration has heard the desperate cry: “Captain, the ship is sinking. Captain, these seas are rough . . .” Despite the obvious need for all hands on deck, our political and civil society leaders continue to take every opportunity to divide and rule, regardless of possible consequences. Their strategy has always been to set we, the people, against ourselves. While we make every effort to keep our heads above water, our respective captains, depending on the situation, hog the lifeboats or take cover in their air-conditioned suites paid for by the very people whose lives and property they swore to protect; the very people they promised under oath to put first at all times. And now we are all, yes, regardless of affiliations, headed at break-neck speed toward disaster.
I’ve often wondered what has changed in our nature to make so many of us behave toward one another like crabs in a bucket, concerned only with self. On last week’s episode of TALK, the host,
Rick Wayne, and the MP for Castries South, Dr Ernest Hilaire, engaged for a time on the subject of democracy.
While viewing the show it occurred to me how far we, captains and crews, had sunk. We have developed a system designed to keep the people in a narcoleptic state, with a warped sense of reality. Meanwhile, those capable of improving the situation choose instead to profit from it. We are at war with ourselves, powerless to positively affect our condition. Victimization has long been an accepted way of life; the worst victims are either too scared to acknowledge the victimization, or they hope to gain eventually from their silence.
We shame voters after every election, not the politicians. We have been conditioned to accept our toxic politics as normal; just the way things are. This kind of thinking was masterfully exposed on last Thursday’s TALK, when Mr. CIP showed himself as either an innocent victim of the system or as a dishonest actor determined to contribute to our collective psychosis.
Rick Wayne opened the show with what I saw as an invitation to his guest to acknowledge, however diplomatically, the shortcomings of our politics and to present a possible route out of the mess that we had created for ourselves, however unwittingly. Rick did this by way of a short allegory from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. He recalled the war with the tiny people of Lilliput on one side and the equally tiny neighbouring islanders known as the Big Endians. Why were they at war? As Rick told it, they could not agree on which end of an egg should be broken, the small end or the big end. Asked the host of his guest: Doesn’t that bring to mind our political parties, forever at war over petty matters at great expense to the nation? At which point Mr. CIP introduced the word “democracy”. As if pointless wars can be justified by a twisted notion of democracy.
To say that because there are contending ideas you have a democracy is fallacious. Conflict between ideas exists in every form of association. The difference can be seen in how these ideas are developed, selected, or rejected. Knowing that Mr. Hillarie has an undergraduate degree in political science I became
even more curious. Is he so confused or so ignorant as not to know our bitter, dirty, and vindictive politics is a built-in feature of what passes for democracy?
For the first 30 minutes of the show Rick attempted to afford Mr. Hillarie the opportunity to establish common ground based on reality. He played a clip featuring the late American politician John McCain. It showed that the recently deceased senator, while engaged in a heated presidential campaign, actually defended his opponent Barack Obama as being “a good family man, a good citizen with whom I happen to have fundamental disagreements”. Mr. Hillarie, having already attempted to normalize our toxic politics, doubled down by claiming that the example was an outlier and that it’s why John McCain was known as a maverick.
I was very happy to see Rick in fine form telling his guest the reasons why McCain was considered a maverick: because he could never be counted on to follow the party line. Rick reminded his guest that while there were several well-known examples of civility in American politics, in local politics none immediately came to mind.
It seemed to me Rick was trying his best to give Mr. Hilaire the opportunity to be break the mould; to be a McCain-style maverick. Sadly Mr. Hilaire resisted. He was there to promote a protest march aimed at getting his party elected to office and that’s all he cared about.
My initial curiosity turned to concern. Hilaire insisted that they only thing about our politics that could be considered bad was Allen Chastanet. He insisted that his party’s rallies promoted nothing counterproductive; only Chastanet’s did. What seemed to me a last resort on the part of Rick was his presentation of a clip from Newsmaker Live. An exchange between the guest Moses JnBaptiste and a caller perfectly highlighted what Rick had been painstakingly trying to establish. I’m sure Rick anticipated Hilaire’s reaction. After he was through expressing how offensive the caller had been, I was convinced then nothing could pull him away from his party’s playbook.
The caller was pushing the point that the SLP, having already failed while in government, needed to re-evaluate why they were voted out and make the required changes before again offering themselves for re-election. I was excited to hear this expressed not only on TALK but also the night before on Newsmaker Live. I have been punching this line ever since concerned citizens started calling for action. From the beginning my position has been that if the SLP is unable to reform itself, I could not have confidence in the party’s ability to reform the country; that lip service and partisan posturing will no longer cut it, and
without visible signs of change, I could not support their actions. I have never been shy in expressing myself publicly, which may be why the PM had me kicked out of one of his town hall meetings . . . but that’s another story.
Funny, isn’t it, that Rick spent so much time trying to establish these points. Many other callers offered great contributions last Thursday evening but my mind was still trying to wrap itself around what I had just witnessed. I wanted to see what the online viewers had to say in real time. I was amazed at how the same symptoms of being in a sunken place were manifesting themselves there. People were totally ignoring the validity and soundness of the points argued to play cheerleader to their respective tribes. Our parties have become like cults, embracing whatever reality has been constructed for them, however false, however insane, to be defended regardless of cost.
Which returns us to Liliput and the Big Endians!
— Writer: Jody Wahl
