Should Ricky T have named his song Ass Attack?

Never mind that last year the “left twosh, right twosh” songs from those Dennery boys were flushed down the carnival toilet. It soon became quite obvious that kids from Cap to Vieux Fort were determined to make the demonstrated moves the local equivalent of the Harlem Shake.

Learning how to bend over and take it this way and that was soon almost everyone’s main ambition. Not even Vybz Kartel, Movado and Popcaan had been able on command to get their fans to carry on like canines in heat with the whole world looking on via YouTube.

Never before had so many found such good reason to worship the female posterior. There was hardly a local soca offering not centered around “bondowe.” That the soca commanders issued their directives in our mother tongue only sweetened the pot:  Fait bondowe vibrate kon en cell-phone! (Vibrate your ass like a cell phone!) Fait bondowe fair lamn! (Let your ass ripple like waves!)

And so it has become commonplace to spot some of our more zaftig (a nice Yiddish word meaning fat and bosomy) young women suddenly dropping to the ground, legs spread from here to Micoud, grinding and humping the boards, grass or mud, not once missing a beat.

Then there’s the 6.30, which has nothing to do with time but everything to do with a not-always-nubile near-naked damsel bent over, head between her wide-open thighs, and rocking that tush like their very lives depended on behaving baaad—a familiar sight these days:  at the clubs, bars, beach bashes, at wet and dry fetes.

Of course none of this would be half the fun it is without a “boog” to stab, jook and hump those “tushes” like male orangutans out of their heads on whatever is the jungle equivalent of Viagara.

And then there’s the audience, so reminiscent of Roman Games spectators. Let anyone over the age of 30 complain and they’ll soon be set right: “Get back to your cobwebs, that’s the way we like it, this is how we dance!”

That kind of retort usually is spewed by half-naked, boozed out, pierced all over, tattooed tigresses with painted acrylic nails at least six inches long. Their boogs in their droopy pants are too busy, er, dancing to pay attention to what an Andre Paul apostle might have to say about their gyrations.

“Later, the god-squadders, their unidentified noses up in the air, will be calling Professor Tim to analyse the deep meanings behind the behinds gone wild. They’ll spew a lot of rum-flavored guff about the way modern girls are free to have fun. As if they had not had their own first babies at 14 or 15.

Some will say it’s just the young people’s way of dealing with the fallout from abuse. And still others will blame the loose behavior on young women with no good reason to expect better days in this lifetime. Oh, and some will blame it all on VAT!

A retired doctor friend has assured me that the human body was just never designed to move and shake like that. What could I say? The man was a doctor; he should know. But then in his heyday, the sight of a woman’s ankles, whether or not the size yamz, was enough to send males of all ages rushing into the bushes!

On Wednesday, even as some holier-than-thou talk show callers were venting their usual disappointment at the behavior of “nasty female revelers,” others were reminding listeners that “in Trinidad is the same thing.”

Nobody talked about the recent State Department revelations about local sex workers and traffickers in human flesh! Neither about the kids forced to use their natural talents to put food on the family table.

Arthur is right of course: “Mas Gone by the Ass!” But then, doesn’t it
say somewhere that “all things must end?” Perhaps Ricky T, who won the road march, should’ve renamed his winning song “Ass Attack!”

BTW: what more proof do we need that Carnival might be exactly as the masses want it? As for the rest who claim to hate carnival but never miss a moment of it, let them keep in mind that in democracies such as ours the eyes in front or behind always have it.

In other words, nothing is quite as we see it, it’s all in the eye of the beholder!